Fire officials are tempted to fill a presentation or report with national fire loss statistics. It seems like a logical thing to do. After all, they point out the gravity of the residential fire problem. However, the purpose of the report is to convince policy makers that there is a fire problem in their jurisdiction. If national statistics dominate the report, the effort can actually backfire. People interpret what they see or hear in terms of their own experience. When they read a statement that there is a house fire every minute in the U. S., they unconsciously check that against where they live. Before they will accept the fact that they have a fire problem and it needs to be remedied with sprinklers, they must be able to apply the facts to their jurisdiction. If any national or regional data is used to make a point, the fire official needs to show how they relate to local conditions.
Relating national data to a local situation is not always easy because the frequency of dwelling fires probably won't equal what happens on a nationwide average. The national data include urban areas, where a significant portion of dwelling fires occur. If the community in question is a suburb of upper middle class homes, there will be no comparison. This is the type of situation where citing national averages can backfire. The person hearing the statement that an average of 12 people die in dwelling fires every day will ask privately how many die locally. If the answer is "not many," the listener might question the fire officials credibility. In the least, the listener will not be convinced that there is a local problem.
Home builders will argue that communities with low fire death rates do not need sprinklers (the RFSI calls this the "Where's the bodies" argument). This does not mean that communities with low fire death rates will be unsuccessful in adopting sprinkler ordinances. Dwelling fires are a reasonably expected event in every community. And even though a serious fire may be a low probability event, it is a high-consequence event. Fire officials can effectively state the case that "It will happen eventually. When it happens, do we want to save lives or not?" They can convince policy makers of the need by driving home the power and swiftness of dwelling fires and the life-saving ability of residential sprinklers. The specifics of how to do this are discussed in a following section.
When the RFSI executive director makes a presentation at policy maker groups, for example a city council work session, he uses a set of 15 slides that include a review of a local fire. The point is to get them focused on the inevitability of residential fires where they live. The slide set is available on Powerpoint, so you can customize with your own information.