PLEASE READ THE CASE OF THE FIRE FIGHTER CASUALTIES BACKGROUND AND COMPETE THE ASSESSMENT SHEET. ALSO ATTACHED ARE POWERPOINT INFO FOR GUIDANCE IN COMPLETING THE ASSIGNMENT

EXAMINING FIRE FIGHTER CASUALTIES

BACKGROUND

A report by the International Fire Chiefs Association revealed that between 2018 and 2020 fire departments nationally exhibited a 25% increase in accidents at fire scenes caused by fatigue. This finding has compelled the Department of Homeland Security to examine the impact of fatigue among fire fighters on severity of fire fighter casualties.

RESEARCH QUESTION TO BE EXPLORED

The Department of Homeland Security seeks to examine the following question: Does fatigue have a strong impact on the severity of fire fighter casualties?

MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM

You have been assigned by the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the validity of the above hypothesis using the 2020 National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) dataset of fire fighter causalities for all fire departments throughout the United States.

Other factors that may impact the severity of fire fighter casualties include: age of the firefighter and number of prior calls in the past 24 hours.

Severity of casualty is measured at the ordinal level, where 1= minor exposure/first aid, 2= treated by doc/moderate, 3= severe/life threatening, and 4= death. Fatigue is measured as a dummy variable, where 0= rested and 1= fatigued/ill.

Measured as a 1/0, the variable fatigue is measuring “fatigueness” among firefighters in that every firefighter who indicates a “1” (i.e., they are fatigued when dispatched to a call), the variable measures the frequency of “fatigueness” among the sample of firefighters.

Age of the fire fighter is measured at the interval level using the fire fighter’s chronological age and the number of prior responses in the past 24 hours is measured at the interval level, using the total number of calls fire fighters responded to while on duty.

Using the correlation and multiple regression analysis, you generate the following results.

TABLE 1: CORRELATION MATRIX OF SEVERITY OF CASUALTY WITH FATIGUE WITH OTHER FACTORS

*p=.05, **p=.0001

DECISION CONSIDERATION

Your chief policy analyst at the Department of Homeland has argued that Homeland Security should require fire departments to establish standard operating procedures (SPOs) to mitigate fatigue as a prerequisite for Homeland Security funding for various operations. As the Director of Policy Development, render a decision based on the data analysis above as to whether you support or deny your chief policy analysis’s claim.