Beyond Suppression: Building Data-Driven Fire Resilience in First Nations Communities

CHASI is proud to maintain a longstanding partnership with the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council (NIFSC). The NIFSC supports Indigenous communities in the development of their internal capacity to enhance community safety and resiliency. As part of this partnership, CHASI is pleased to amplify their articles on our blog.

CHASI’s collaboration with the NIFSC, and many of their other research work, can be found on our NIFSC Publications page. For questions about the NIFSC and their work, please visit their contact page.

Beyond Suppression: Building Data-Driven Fire Resilience in First Nations Communities

By Len Garis and Mandy Desautels

The safety community must confront the persistent and disproportionate fire risk faced by First Nations peoples in Canada. For a very long time, the narrative has been defined by tragic outcomes rather than evidence-based prevention. A recent independent and critical assessment, the National Indigenous Fire Safety Data Collection Evaluation, provides a much-needed strategic pivot.

This evaluation was expertly conducted by Dr. Joe Clare, an Associate Professor whose academic background, including a degree in behavioural and cognitive science, makes him uniquely suited to dissect the crucial interplay between human decision-making, systemic failure, and fire data integrity.

Commissioned by the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council (NIFSC), the evaluation reviewed three core pillars of data collection—the voluntary National Incident Reporting System (NIRS), Home Safety Assessments (HSA), and Fire Department Assessments (FDA)—and delivered a compelling blueprint for strategic reform.

Dr. Clare’s analysis confirms that to truly address the elevated fatality rates, the focus must shift decisively: from a reactive reliance on suppression to a proactive, data-informed strategy prioritizing home-based life safety systems and dramatically improving the quality and national coverage of incident data. For fire services working across Canada, the evaluation is a call to action to move beyond simply responding to alarms and to embed themselves as partners in community-based risk reduction.

The Crisis of Relative Risk: Data Speaks

The statistics anchoring this evaluation are stark and unavoidable. Indigenous people in Canada face a fire-related fatality risk that is five times higher than the general population. This figure is compounded for those living on reserve, where the risk can increase to 10 times the national average.

These fatalities are not random events; they are intrinsically linked to systemic socio-economic determinants of health and safety. The evaluation reaffirms that the highest fire risk is concentrated in communities where residents are over-represented in challenging conditions, including:

• Housing Condition: Living in dwellings that require major repairs—a significant factor in fire spread and occupant protection.
• Crowding: Over-occupancy increases ignition sources, blocks egress and hinders timely escape.
• Socio-economic Status: Low-income households often lack resources for working smoke alarms, maintenance, or safe heating practices.
• Remoteness: Extended response times for fire suppression, a critical factor underpinning the entire strategic shift required.

Tools that utilize key social and environmental variables to rank relative fire risk highlight that fire risk is not evenly distributed. This non-random concentration of risk necessitates that intervention—from prevention education to infrastructure funding—be targeted to communities where the risk profile is highest.

NIRS Deficiencies: A Strategy Blind Spot

The voluntary nature of the NIRS is arguably its greatest flaw, resulting in a dataset too incomplete to be fully actionable. Analysis of the reports—which recorded over a thousand incidents—showed severe temporal and geographic inconsistencies. For example, a disproportionate 60% of all reported incidents across a fourteen-year window were reported in a single recent year, and only a small fraction of the estimated Bands across Canada participated in reporting. This under-reporting—particularly of non-fatal incidents—skews the casualty rates and artificially inflates the perceived risk per fire event, masking the true breadth of the fire problem.

The Fundamental Life Safety Conclusion

The most compelling and operationally significant finding relates to residential structure fires. The evaluation revealed that fires that were extinguished or had burned out before the fire department arrived—less than 10% of all reported incidents—were responsible for a staggering 53 percent of all fatalities.

This data mandates an immediate philosophical and operational shift for the fire service. In remote or semi-remote communities, a heavy reliance on the fire suppression system—the expensive machinery and personnel required to extinguish a fire—is a demonstrably failed fatality reduction strategy.

Where response times are protracted, the fate of occupants is decided within the first few minutes of a fire. Therefore, the singular priority for fatality reduction must become immediate, on-site life safety systems. This means prioritizing early detection, alerting, and effective means of egress.

Missing Data as a Barrier to Prevention

The NIRS data also suffers from profound missingness across critical variables that could inform prevention efforts. For example, the area of fire origin, which is crucial for determining where educational campaigns should focus, was unknown, missing, or ‘NA’ in well over half of the records.

This data void acts as a strategic blind spot. Without knowing how and why fires start and why victims failed to escape, fire service leaders are forced to guess at the most effective prevention strategies. Dr. Clare’s background lends crucial weight to analyzing these ‘human factor’ data gaps, which include the high percentages of missing information on the ‘act or omission’ leading to ignition. His analysis underscores that effective prevention is fundamentally a behavioral challenge, requiring data that can accurately capture and categorize individual and community actions related to risk and safety.

Crucially, smoke alarm presence and functionality were unknown/missing in two-thirds of residential fire records. However, where data was available, the death rate was highest when there was no working alarm present. Furthermore, the current NIRS aggregated data structure cannot accommodate the multiple casualties that can result from a single fire incident, causing the loss of vital information like casualty age and cause of failure to escape.

The Audits: Assessing Capacity and Compliance

The evaluation also assessed the effectiveness of localized data collection through Home Safety Assessments (HSA) and Fire Department Assessments (FDA).

The voluntary HSA process, which provides a localized snapshot of safety conditions, showed promise. Data indicated that an average of 70% of houses assessed had working smoke alarms. While the sample size is small, this figure is notably higher than the rate captured in the aggregated incident data, suggesting that the HSA process, where implemented, acts as a valuable, proactive measure, identifying local successes and localized intervention needs.

Conversely, the FDA audits—which assess the operational and administrative compliance of local First Nations fire departments—exposed critical capacity gaps. Compliance scores across the audited locations showed significant room for improvement, particularly in Fire Life Safety and Public Education Programs, where compliance averaged a low score. This is not simply a matter of under-equipped stations; it is a lack of foundational programs that are essential for long-term fire resilience.

A Comprehensive Six-Point Strategy for Resilience

Based on these findings, the evaluation provides a clear, high-level strategic framework for the NIFSC and the broader Canadian fire safety community.

1. Prioritize Life Safety Systems and Targeted Education

The shift in focus must be absolute: fatalities are best prevented by Engineering and Education, not Suppression.

• • Smoke Alarm Mandate: Implement a strategy to ensure high coverage of present and functioning smoke alarms. This should include exploring the use of long-life, sealed battery alarms to reduce maintenance failures and partnering with community services to track and verify functionality.
  • The Case for Residential Sprinklers: Given the fatal consequences of delayed suppression, a risk-based strategy must prioritize the installation of residential sprinkler systems in new builds or major renovations in the highest-risk communities, making the building itself the primary fire suppression tool.
  • Precision Prevention: Utilise the existing data (e.g., available causal factors like cooking and smoking) to develop and deploy targeted educational campaigns. These campaigns should be culturally informed, delivered by local partners, and specifically address the human acts or omissions known to cause ignition.

2. NIRS Data Structure and Standardization

The data system itself must be immediately optimized for strategic planning.

• • Standardize Forms: The NIRS data collection forms must be formally aligned with other national and provincial fire reporting frameworks to ensure comparability and data integrity.
  • Solve the One-to-Many Problem: The system must be modified to allow for the one-to-many relationship of a single fire incident resulting in multiple casualties. This allows analysts to preserve the unique characteristics of each fatality, which is vital for prevention research.
  • Improve Training: Intensive, mandatory training for all reporting entities is required to dramatically reduce the high volume of missing responses, thereby increasing the value of every submitted report.

3. Increase Engagement and Strategic Partnerships

No single agency can solve the complex fire problem alone.

• • Broaden the Reporting Base: Develop and implement sustainable partnership-based strategies to increase fire incident and casualty reporting. This means moving beyond the fire department and engaging other community service providers.
  • Leveraging Non-Fire Partners: The highest-impact partners are those already making routine house calls: health services, police, child and family services, and housing inspectors. These partners could be trained to report on foundational safety conditions (e.g., checking for working smoke alarms) during their routine visits, creating a passive, continuous stream of prevention data.
  • Risk-Based Prioritization: Use relative community risk models to prioritize which communities to target for increased reporting and for implementing fire prevention actions, ensuring resources are deployed for maximum impact.

4. HSA Consistency and Structure

The HSA process, while small in scope, holds immense local value and must be scaled and standardized.

• • National Template: Implement a consistent structure for the HSA forms across all reporting communities. This national template ensures that local data can be aggregated to inform national policy while still addressing unique local risks.
  • Focus on Local Action: Amend the summary form to not just report findings but to aggregate local deficiencies and trigger immediate intervention requirements (e.g., installing specific alarms, removing identified hazards).

5. Risk-Based FDA Audits and Remediation

The FDA process must become a strategic tool for capacity building.

• • Target Audits: Implement a risk-based approach to prioritize the FDA audits, directing evaluation resources to the highest-risk communities first.
  • Prioritize Remediation: Focus remediation efforts on high-impact, low-cost areas first: life safety programs, public education, and document management. Increasing compliance in these areas offers the highest return on investment in terms of casualty reduction, often requiring capacity building and training rather than capital expenditure.

6. Commit to Evaluation and Learning

Finally, any new strategy must be held accountable. The NIFSC must commit to undertaking continuous process and impact evaluations of every change implemented.

• • Process Evaluation: Did we implement the new data system correctly? Did we train the partners effectively?
  • Impact Evaluation: Did the new strategies result in a measurable decrease in fire incidents or fatalities per capita?

Without dedicated evaluation, resources risk being perpetually misallocated.

The findings of this evaluation are a strong challenge to the entire Canadian fire service community. It is a demand to move beyond historical, reactive approaches and embrace a sophisticated, risk-based, data-driven strategy to ensure equity in fire safety outcomes for First Nations communities. The path to reducing fatalities is clear: it starts with a functioning smoke alarm in every home and a commitment to data integrity and strategic partnership across all agencies.

Authors

Len Garis is director of research for the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council, Ret. Fire Chief for the city of Surrey, B.C., Research Associate – University of the Fraser Valley associate scientist emeritus with the B.C. Injury Research and Prevention Unit. Contact him at lwgaris@outlook.com. 

Mandy Desautels is Chief Administrative Officer at the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council. Prior to joining NIFSC, she worked for BC Emergency Health Services and prominent NGOs. Contact her at mandy.desautels@indigenousfiresafety.ca.