Each year, starting with the Martin Luther King holiday, fire departments around the nation support a weeklong campaign to educate communities about Community Risk Reduction. Community Risk Reduction, otherwise known as CRR, is a proactive, data-driven process to identify and prioritize local risks, followed by the integrated and strategic mitigation of those risks. The strategies used to reduce these risks and their impact include Education, Engineering, Enforcement, Economic Incentives/Disincentives, and Emergency Response. The strategies can be implemented separately or in conjunction with others. The goal of CRR is to build healthy, safe, and resilient communities.
Liberty Lake CRR Week Proclamation
Millwood CRR Week Proclamation
Spokane Valley CRR Week Proclamation
Liberty Lake, Millwood, and Spokane Valley City Councils have signed and adopted our 2023 CRR Week proclamations. To view these proclamations, please click the links above. Throughout the week, we will post videos discussing how Spokane Valley Fire Department (SVFD) incorporates these five concepts of CRR.
- Education: Education strategies and initiatives help to raise awareness and knowledge of a community’s fire and life safety risks and ways to mitigate these risks. Spokane Valley Fire Department offers several established educational programs as well as delivers fire and life safety presentations upon request. One of our newest programs, a bike safety and helmet giveaway program, is highlighted during our 2023 CRR Week Campaign.
- Engineering: Engineering solutions mean changing a product or the physical environment to prevent or mitigate a risk. Spokane Valley Fire Department has developed several programs that incorporate engineering solutions. During our 2023 CRR Week Campaign, we share with you our new “fire station alerting systems”. It is currently being installed in all our stations. This new alerting system will help to reduce our emergency response times, increase situational awareness, protect our firefighters’ health and wellness, and reduce dispatch stress and call processing times.
- Enforcement: Enforcement actions apply to mitigating risks through the legislative process of strengthening and adopting applicable laws. Our inspection process looks to ensure that codes are continuously observed and maintained throughout our service area and, in some cases, imposing penalties. Our inspectors and fire marshals look at risk factors, ranging from the building, contents, and use, while they conduct approximately 5,500 annual business inspections. We also inspect the Spokane County Fairgrounds before every event to ensure its safety to the vendors as well as the visitors that participate in the shows. We share with you the inspection process for a recent quilting show at The Fairgrounds.
- Economic Incentives/Disincentives: Economic incentives/disincentives can be incorporated to mitigate risks. Economic disincentives can result in monetary fines, fees, tickets, or citations. Economic incentives can include sales, coupons, and discounts for mitigating risks. We spotlight our smoke alarm program for you during our 2023 CRR Week Campaign. In 2022, we installed over 800 FREE, smoke alarms in homes throughout our area. Since this program’s inception, we have saved 11 lives directly related to this program.
- Emergency Response: Effective Emergency Response can mitigate sudden injury and illness, save lives, and reduce or prevent property loss throughout our community. Deploying the right resources, both personnel and equipment, with the right training is key to how we mitigate risks in our area. During the 2023 CRR Week Campaign, we feature a recent acquired structure training burn exercise. It is critical that we train and perfect our skills not only in how we provide medical care but also in how we fight fires.
Community Risk Reduction is very important to us. So much so that our mission statement reads “We are professionals who care for our community through emergency response and risk reduction.” We are proud to serve our community and protect you and your property every hour of every day.
These highlighted CRR Programs and many others, that reduce risks in our community, are made possible through the M&O Levy. Please vote on February 14, 2023.
