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American Community Survey (ACS)

Using Census Bureau Data and Enigma’s Smoke Signals to Save Lives Webinar

Transcript

October 13, 2016 Gretchen Gooding American Community Survey Office

This presentation was presented as a webinar to the General Public on October 13, 2016. A file of the audio recording is available to download at https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations.html. A transcript of the webinar follows. Slide

references and links have been added to the spoken text as appropriate.

Slide 1-Using Census Bureau Data and Enigma’s Smoke Signals to Save Lives Coordinator: Thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only

mode. At the end of today’s presentation we will conduct a Question and

Answer session. To ask a question please press Star 1. Today’s conference is

being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time.

And we’d now like to turn the meeting over to Ms. Gretchen Gooding.

Ma’am you may begin.

Gretchen Gooding:Alright thank you. Good afternoon everyone and thank you and happy Fire

Prevention Week. Thank you for joining our Webinar using Census Bureau

data and Enigma’s Smoke Signals to save lives.

As this presentation came together the scope expanded a little bit beyond our

original title and I think you’ll see today that our speakers represent local

government business non-profits and you’ll see how they’re using public data

from sources such as the Census Bureau to create tools like Smoke Signals to

help local communities.

And while our examples today are focusing on the risk - reducing the risk of

fires I encourage you all to think about other ways that you can use this data in

our communities to possibly save lives or improve the quality of life.

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Slide 2-Overview and Speakers

So I’m going to do an overview of what we’ll discuss today and introduce our

speakers. So first I have Chief Tim McConnell the Superintendent for the

New Orleans Fire Department and Oliver Wise from the Office of

Performance and Accountability and they’re going to be talking about the

background between the City of New Orleans and the tragedy that they had in

their city that’s brought the collaboration with Enigma.

And then I’m Gretchen Gooding I’m from the American Community Survey

Office at the US Census Bureau and I’ll be giving an overview of the

American Community Survey just one of the data sources that was used in the

smoke signal’s project. Next we’ll have Mike Flowers and Jeremy Krinsley

from Enigma. Mike is the Chief Analytics Officer and Jeremy is in the data

and engineering area and they’ll be talking about Smoke Signals an overview

of that and also a demonstration of how it works.

And then we have Matt Hinds-Aldrich from the National Fire Protection

Association. He’s going to be talking about how NFPA uses free tools and

uses free data to find solutions at the local level. And then at the end if we

have time we’ll take questions as well.

Slide 3-City of New Orleans Smoke Alarm Program Now I’m going to turn it over to Chief McConnell and Oliver Wise from New

Orleans.

Slide 4-Smoke Alarms Matter Timothy McConnell: Good afternoon. I wanted to talk about, you know, how we got involved in

this program. The New Orleans Fire Department we’ve always had a smoke

alarm installation program however, you know, we just kind of counted on

people who would call us and request a smoke alarm as opposed to, you

know, going out and doing it very aggressive door to door. We had 22 people

die in fires in 2010 to 2014 and then on a tragic night on November 11, 2014

we had a family of five die in a fire.

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And that really sparked - as I said this is crazy - we really need to know how

to prevent this. I got 33 years on the job and I’ve never had a fatality in a

house that had a working smoke alarm. And so I knew that this was a method

that if we could get smoke alarms in everyone’s home we would be much

better off and be much more effective at our jobs. So we’ve again to start

trying to escalate that. Well the Office of Performance and Accountability Mr.

Wise you’re going to hear from him in a minute came and said look we’d like

to try and help you all.

We, you know, heard about the fatalities and we think we can help you use

some of the data that we’re doing to - that we use, you know, and everyday

part of that job to target those areas that are most in need. And, you know, we

know that the - we were trying to look for people who are most likely to die in

a fire and who was most likely to not have a smoke alarm. So they partnered

with us and whereas we had been getting maybe our best years we did 1000

smoke alarms installed and that was done through advertising on buses and for

billboards and stuff.

People would call and ask we really want to go out and do some door to door

stuff in the neighborhood. So they took their approach showed us where the

target which areas we’d be most effective and during the course of next year

we did over 10,000. So we know they save lives and we’ll talk a little bit

about that later. But at this point I’ll turn it over to Mr. Wise.

Slide 5-Neighborhoods Most in Need Oliver Wise: Thanks Chief. Yes so as the Chief said where data could provide value here is

helping the - our fire department find that needle in the haystack find those

(unintelligible) those homes that were most in need of smoke alarms and

basically the output of our analysis was this map which ranked the census

block groups in the city by their need. It was then converted into kind of the

fire districts so that the fire fighters that the Chief McConnell leads could go

out in a very targeted way to those neighborhoods most in need.

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Slide 6-Approach

So as the Chief said there is kind of two research questions that played into

that map one is to find those areas of the city where you’re going to have

homes that are least likely to have smoke alarms and then secondly find those

areas of the city that are most likely to suffer fire fatalities. And this Dylan

Knaggs who’s a really a super star was the analyst on my team who worked

on this and we couldn’t have done it without the support and review and really

great help of the team at Enigma including Mike Flowers and Raluca.

Slide 7-Data Sources So data we used. It was good old fashion public data from the Census Bureau

and then our own administrative data from our fire department. So there were

- this is data that I think is readily available to anyone I mean the Census data

is obviously readily available to any person which who can get to it and then I

think all fire departments have decent data on the locations of the fires.

Slide 8-What Homes Are Least Likely to Have Smoke Alarms? So first, what homes are at least likely have smoke alarms? So that took a little

creativity of using both the American Housing Survey and the American

Community Survey. So the American Housing Survey ask respondents

whether or not they have smoke alarms installed in their homes.

However that data is only available at the county or parish level. So in order to

drill that down to a more granular level we found that there were variables in

common that were asked in the American Housing Survey and also the

American Community Survey which have data available on a much more

granular level.

So we used logistic regression model where the presence of a smoke alarm is

the dependent variable so the outcome variable that we’re trying to predict and

questions that were both in the American Housing Survey and American

Community Survey were those candidate independent variables.

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Slide 9-Results of Regression Analysis And what we found was that if you consider the year the structure was built so

hold old the building is when the resident moved into the house. So basically

how long they live there and the household income compared to poverty

levels. So basically how poor that household is. You can have a pretty good

prediction of whether that house is going to have a smoke alarm or not.

Slide 10-Predictive Power of Model And so what this has allowed you to do is the dotted line and I can’t see it too

well in this slide but the dotted line shows what would do if a smoke - if a

firefighter went out at random.

And what it means is if you along X axis if you get to about 20% .2 of the

houses you would find about 20% of the homes needing the smoke alarms. So

20% of the problem. Under if you used this model you would be about twice

as efficient. So if you go out 20% of the houses you’re going to find 40% of

the problem.

Slide 11-Least Likely to Have Smoke Alarms So and this was basically this - that part of the analysis the NAPA those areas

of the city least likely to have a smoke alarm.

Slide 12-What Areas of the Cities Are Most Prone to Fire Fatalities? So then Part 2 of this is finding those areas of the city that are most probe to

fire fatalities. And so great research from the NFPA shows that the very old or

the old and the very young those under 5 years of age are most likely to - are

most at risk of death if there is going to be - if there is a fire in that house

which makes a whole lot of sense because they’re the most vulnerable and the

least mobile.

Slide 13-Overall Fire Fatality Risk So to figure out where we had that fire fatality risk we built a model that

considered the concentration of fires in that area normalized by homes in that

census block group.

And then also considered where we have concentrations of the very young and

the very old and here’s the map of that.

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Slide 14-Most at Risk of Fire Fatalities So basically we just put the two together we created an index that considered

both factors and we put them together and the fire department then started

going out and the very proactive strategic way to install smoke alarms by

going door to door.

Slide 15-NOFD Saves Lives by Targeted Smoke Alarm Outreach And one of those neighborhoods that they went to first I think it was the first

neighborhood they went to was Central City which is a neighborhood in New

Orleans which has all of those indicators of need.

It’s a poor community with a lot of old historic housing stock and people have

lived there a long time. And they went out and installed smoke alarms there

and about seven or eight months later there was a fire in one of those houses

that they hit and 11 people including a two-month old infant were able to

escape safely from that fire because of this intervention those really cheap

smoke alarms that was installed by the New Orleans Fire Department just six

or seven months before.

Slide 16-Overview of the American Community Survey Gretchen Gooding:Alright thank you Oliver thank you Chief McConnell. So one of the data

sources that Oliver mentioned he was speaking was the American Community

Survey so I’m going to give you just a little overview of the ACS.

Slide 17-Stats in Action Videos So if you enjoyed what you enjoyed what you heard Oliver and Chief

McConnell talking about it’s also in video format it’s one of our - it is our

newest video in our staff and action video series it’s about their smoke alarm

outreach programs. It’s a couple minutes long and I encourage you to check it

out. I think it’s really well done. And also there’s other videos in this series

that are great too.

Slide 18-ACS Basics So the American Community Survey I just want to go over some basics it’s an

ongoing national survey it samples about three and a half million addresses

per year and it produces detailed population and housing estimates and it’s

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designed to produce the critical information on small areas and small

population groups that was previously collected on the decennial long form.

So if you remember back to Census 2000 everyone had sort of the short form

questions that they answered and then certain households were selected to

answer a longer questionnaire with more information on it. So instead of

having that kind of one big update every ten years the American Community

Survey is now collecting that information on a yearly basis. We cover 35 over

35 topics and Oliver mentioned some of them when he was speaking and I’ll

go into more detail on that. And we support over 300 new and federal

government uses.

And we have two data releases each year our one year estimates that are based

on 12 months of data and then our fives estimates that are based on 60 months

of data. I’ll talk about when those releases happened in a couple of slides.

Slide 19-ACS Data Collection Process For data collection process we have four different modes: Internet, mail,

telephone, and personal visit.

So for most of our housing units the first phase of collection is an invitation to

respond to your Internet which is mailed to the address and if we don’t hear

back via Internet we’ll send out a paper questionnaire.

And then if we still don’t hear from you by mail or Internet we have to follow-

up with what we call CATI or Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing if a

telephone number is available. And then if we still haven’t heard from you

from CATI or we don’t have a phone number then we can - some addresses

are selected for the Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing or CAPI.

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Slide 20-ACS Content Oliver discussed some of the variables or different topics that we collect

information on. He’s talked about income, age of structure, which we calling

year built, and tenure.

We generally grew by content for four main areas: social, economic, housing,

and demographic. So for social characteristics I’m not going to read

everything but it includes topics like educational attainment, marital status,

Veteran’s, disability. Demographic characteristics kind of what you’d expect

sex, age, race, Hispanic origin, relationship to the householder. Economic

characteristics include employment status, income, commuting, health

insurance. And then housing includes things like tenure, home value, cost,

they have computer and Internet usage in the home and what not. So we have

35 topics over a thousand tables and billions of estimates that come out of

this.

Slide 21-Selected Census Geographic Concepts And one of things that Oliver said that you may have noticed is that they had a

really small level of geography so kind of like the things that would put the

community in the American Community Survey is that we have information

available for just lots and lots of different geography levels. So this map just

has kind of a - or this slide has kind of a selected geographic concept kind of

showing a nice nesting relationship.

And if you look down at the bottom we have block groups which is what they

were using in New Orleans for their project and that’s our smallest geography

that we have data for. They’re areas of between 600 and 3000 people and our

smallest building block and you can see we have five other probably more

familiar geographies too like counties and states metropolitan statistical areas

school district et cetera lots and lots of different geographies.

Slide 22-Availability of ACS Data Products And then we collect this information and we release it.

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So we have for areas of 65,000 or more we have both one and five year

estimates and then for smaller communities geographies with populations less

than 65,000 we have the five year estimate. And so a couple of weeks ago on

September 15 we released the 2015 one year estimate.

So we released our data the year after it was collected and then in a couple of

months couple of weeks on December 8 we’ll be releasing the 2011 to 15

ACS five year estimates. So that’ll cover information collected from 2011

through 2015.

And you’ll see on the bottom of these slides they often have links to our Web

site and we can learn more information.

Slide 23-ACS Website And speaking of our Web site it’s census.gov/acs. So a lot of what I’m talking

about is also available on our Web site the great resource for respondents and

for data users to find more information about the survey.

Slide 24-Selected Ways to Access So not only do we collect the data we also have different tools that we create

to help people access it.

And so this is just a couple of the different tools we provide kind of in order

of ease. QuickFacts what we think of is generally one of the easiest tools all

the way down to the API and I don’t have time to go into detail on each of

these tools but I do want to highlight a few of them for you.

And again the link on the bottom of the screen is where you can find more

information on these.

Slide 25-QuickFacts So the ones that I want to start with is QuickFacts at census.gov/quickfacts as

the name was suggested it really is kind of a quick easy way to find

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information about people businesses and geographies it’s available for states

counties cities and towns with a population over 5000.

And it’s you had it meant for kind of the average data users or someone you

don’t want to dig too deep to get to your information that you just basically

type in your geography and you can get different information not only from

the American Community Survey but also from some of our programs as well.

Slide 26-American FactFinder For those of you who kind of want all the data you want all the tables you’re

interested in all kinds of different geographies beyond what you’d find in

QuickFacts.

American Fact Finder is probably the best resource for you

factfinder.census.gov again that’s where kind of everything is located all the

tables all the years all the geographies. So if you really want to delve into it

that’s the best spot for you.

Slide 27-Application Programming Interface (API) And then if you’re interested maybe you’re a developer you want to make

some sort of Web app or mobile app. We also have an application

programming interface or API. It’s a tool for collecting the variables or data

that you want in a raw format from our different data sets.

And includes the American Community Survey but also a number of other

Census Bureau data sets and it’s a great resource again if you’re looking, you

know, to make an app or kind of more advanced programming.

Slide 28-Continue the Conversation #ACSdata We’re also we like to continue the conversation and let us know how you’re using our

information so we have a hashtag ACS data where all of our social media.

You see a bunch of different Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram,

Pinterest, LinkedIn.

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We also have in the kind of upper left hand corner a way that you can

subscribe to our email updates to find out when we’re going to conferences

when we have data releases what not. I talked about our Web site and then we

also have a 1-800 number if you need assistance with using data.

Slide 29-American Community Survey Data User Group We also have another great resource our data user group to help and improve

the understanding of the value and utility of ACS. It’s acsdatusers.org they

have that Web site.

You can join the online community and you can talk to other data users about

how you’re using the data or different challenges that you’re having. And

probably the most exciting announcement lately is that we’re having our next

data user group conference in May 2017 and it’ll be at the Patent and

Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia so I think there’s a call for papers

going out soon so if you’re interested in presenting or sending that it coming

up very soon.

Slide 30-Need Local Stats? And then for those of you who presumably are all over the country if you do

need assistance using Census Bureau data not just ACS but any Census

Bureau product we have staff that are across the country called Data

Dissemination Specialists and you can contact them if you need help with data

or you’re interested in some type of presentation. Their email address is there

and they’re a great resource for those of you all across the country.

Slide 31-Smoke Signals I’m going to turn it over now to our Smoke Signals folks and to Mike.

Mike Flowers: Oh hi and thanks for that. It’s Mike Flowers I’m going to (unintelligible)

around a little bit before I give over the stick to the real star of the show here

after Chief McConnell. Just by way of background I am the Chief Analytics

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Officer at Enigma Technology a New York City company that has this

foundation public data and technology to use that public data or to solve

problems right. And so the genesis of the smoke signal project really rests

with Oliver and Chief McConnell.

Oliver sort of had mentioned something to me during while we were kind of

pulling together that project in New Orleans that one of the beauties of it was

that it was leveraging the ACS and the AHS and just and public data from the

Census so as its backbone. And, you know, his takeaway from that was well

then anybody can do this right. And so, you know, that set off a little light

bulb in my head and I was like boss anybody can do this maybe we can help a

little to a certain degree right.

And so that’s sort of how we got started and really again it started with, you

know, some pragmatic vision coming out New Orleans in the form of Chief

McConnell and Oliver Wise.

Slide 32-25,000 People Are Killed or Injured Each Year in 1 Million Fires Across the

United States But, you know, what we’re really talking about here is just taking all of this

information and putting it in a condition that it can be used by pretty much

anybody First Responder, NGOs within a community so that they could

improve the safety posture of the communities in which they live 25,000

people a year are killed or injured in a million fires across the United States.

So obviously the national problem is the deaths that I think Chief McConnell

will be the first one to tell you are (unintelligible) preventable provided that

somebody has a smoke alarm in the house right.

Slide 33-How Many Had a Smoke Alarm? And the question then became of course could we take what happened in New

Orleans what we’re able to do what Oliver and his team were able to discern

in New Orleans which was, you know, can we get a better door knock rate

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right like return on door knock that return being a place that doesn’t have a

smoke detector that we can then go in and put one in could we do that

nationally.

Slide 34-Data Is Powerful When It Drives Action And the answer essentially, you know, was yes. The idea again is just simply

to provide actionable insight for people who are going out into their

communities to help people right and you’re talking about our most

vulnerable citizens right like, you know, people in conditions of poverty

people they’re very old they’re very young. People who actually most need

government help but it turns out the government data leverage the right way

can get that help to where it’s most needed most quickly right.

And everybody ends up winning here. You know, we had some wonderful

partners in all that, you know, the Red Cross and of course, you know, the

City of New Orleans and several others and DataKind an organization run by

a friend of mine named Jake Porway who by the way Raluca who had been,

you know, (the analyst) at Enigma who had assisted New Orleans in this

project she’s now over at DataKind that just tells you there’s a lot of cross

pollination in this community in terms of trying to help people with this public

information.

Slide 35-Signals And then what came out of that was this product Smoke Signals was Jeremy

(unintelligible) position to discuss, you know, just to kind of tee it up. The

idea of visualization of all of these metrics that we were describing like in

such a way that, you know, any number of 200 communities in the United

States could leverage it but and make it even more robust by adding, you

know, their own incident data because the model becomes significantly more

robust when you add local incident data and we left it to the discretion of the

communities to do that.

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But at this point Jeremy I’m going to turn it over to you to kind of walk

people through.

Slide 36-Demo Jeremy Krinsley: Alright great. I’m going share my desktop right now. Let me know if that’s

working great. So this the Web site and this (unintelligible) about Enigma that

I (unintelligible) Smoke Signals is the home for both sort of the story around

this project and also all of the products and or the tools perhaps that we used

(unintelligible) projects. So on this home page you can see you can search my

area. And as Mike Flowers mentioned this project was an attempt to sort of

take the work that New Orleans did and generalize it to the extent over the 30

largest metropolitan areas in the country which in turn is 200 separate

municipalities.

So I’m just going to give Chicago as an example. And when you search that it

takes you down to this map view or you sort of get an overview of the risk or

and basically what we’re looking at here is block groups and for each block

group you can sort of hop over and get the likelihood that the structures in

each block group do not have a smoke alarm. So as you can see certain areas

are much more likely to be worth targeting than others. And I’m going to sort

of just jump around the Web site a little bit since we’ve sort of been talking

about the background.

But one thing I’d like to note is that every single piece that this tool that we’ve

built is open source so you can sort of click through these links to see the

underlying pieces. These are some examples these are on gethub.com this sort

of gives you the ideas how we merged AHS and ACS if you’re technically

minded this is the model that we actually used to come up with the scores.

And furthermore we have sort of detailed documentation in our blogs that

goes through all of the steps that we derive at the numbers.

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And lastly I just want to walk through sort of the bottom of this Web site

where you can sort of move from the 30,000 foot view of so we just sort of

look at Chicago and download the data. I already downloaded it so you don’t

have to watch that. But basically what happens is when you get the download

is that you have a (CSB) which gives you street blocks for the city associated

with risk scores. So up here we have the smoke risk which is the smoke alarm

risk and I’ve already sorted it.

So what it’s saying is that all of these streets with these street ranges though

87 hundred to 9398 on (Unintelligible) Avenue in Cook County Illinois has

perhaps the highest smoke risk or sort of all of these here. But then a company

was that it’s this population risk which is what Oliver Wise was speaking

about in terms of very young and very old people. You might using these two

pieces as going through this outreach so that’s something like, you know,

these street ranges to focus on.

And lastly the augmenting your data that Mike Flowers referred to is available

at the bottom of the Web site and basically what you need is a (CSC) where

each row as a fire incident that includes a column for a latitude and a

longitude and what you can do which I won’t demonstrate.

Well actually because I also already did it is you can upload from your

computer that (CSC) and it’ll send for somewhere between 10 to 30 seconds it

will spit out a slightly different (CSV) which is taken into account your

incident data and augmented it with this overall risk or so you can again sort

of triage your outreach. And that is basically a very quick overview of the

smoke signal’s Web site thank you.

Slide 38-The Fire Data Revolution (Matt Hinds-Aldrich): So this is (Matt Hinds-Aldrich) I’m going to take over control. And (Matt

Hinds-Aldrich) with National Fire Protection Association. I’m going to speak

a little bit about basically how we take or how we’re working with local

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agencies and some of the folks in the field that are actually doing some of this

work and trying to spin that up at a national level than to (unintelligible) and

to actually make that available back to local agencies.

And so really the - so and I myself recently joined NFPA from Atlanta Fire

and Rescue Department so I’m really focused on how do we take these

national level insights and these national level tools and actually make them

more relevant and more useful and to at the local level?

Slide 39-Don’t Wait Check the Date And so and but before I do that I’d be remiss being that it is Fire Prevention

week and that is well NFPA is perhaps most well-known for. But I just want

to make sure everyone knows that the theme of this year is that is basically

that smoke alarms have a ten year life cycle to them.

And so make sure you check the data on the back of the smoke alarm and if

it’s over ten years it’s time to get a new one and so have you.

Slide 40-Community Risk Reduction Paradigm Shift So (let’s move on). So it really comes down to what like New Orleans and

what Enigma has highlighted here is indicative of a larger paradigm shift in

the fire service which is basically the better use of data information and

evidence to focus on support what we do in the fire service which is trying to

present injuries and deaths and loss from fire.

And so really this paradigm shift is really rooted in what occurred in the

United Kingdom in the past decade or so where they really initiated some of

these concepts in terms of really focusing and drilling down into where are the

problems in your community and then identifying really proactive strategies to

do this. And they’ve been incredibly successful over the past decade and have

had dramatic results in terms of reducing fire casualties and fire loss.

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And so the American Fire Services really taking this fall and running with it

and we have taken all of this great leads that have been developed in some of

these kind of forerunners whether it be New Orleans or the UK or other

communities. So basically taking that and trying to figure out how to help

other agencies use that same kind of technology and the same kind of

approach in their community.

Slide 41-Designing Community Risk Reduction Campaign And so here at NFPA we’ve done a lot of work and there’s a lot of great

resources out there around what is community risk reduction and how does

one do it and how can I actually create a program here in my community? So

there’s - we have a White Paper that we recently released that focuses on a

few urban communities in the country and also we have a few standards that

can help fire departments who are maybe just starting with this or community

groups that are working with fire departments so they’re starting these type of

programs.

And what is - what should they think about? What - how should they focus on

it and what should be included? And so NFPA 13, 1452, and 1730 really kind

of highlight some of these approaches around community risk reduction.

Slide 42-Identifying “At Risk” People And so really it starts then to the focus is on who are most at risk in your

community what type of risks do they face and then basically using that

focused analysis then the question becomes where do they live? And so in

terms of identifying the who, there’s a ton of resources and the work that was

done in New Orleans has really highlighted this.

And so and there’s a lot of programs once you figured out where you’re going

to target and who you’re going to target there’s some really like great fire

prevention programs that are out there they can use remembering one being

one of the - and so there’s a lot of work that can be done. And like we - and

NFPAs really working to kind of create some tools that can help utilize this

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information and provide tools at the local level. And as they are highlighted

that seniors at proportionately kind of the highest risk of having fire deaths

and injuries.

And so if we can target some of those communities and figure out where -

what types of fires they’re having then we can actually start having dramatic

impact on reducing that fire risk and the loss.

Slide 43-Identifying “At Risk” Communities & Houses And so then also as I mentioned it comes into where the fires are occurring

and what types of fires are occurring in what community. And so there’s

intuitively we have a lot of kind of ideas about the bad parts of towns or the

really high fire risk parts of towns.

This whole program this whole paradigm shift is really highlighting that

actually we need to have a little bit more than intuition and gut instincts. And

so because some maybe necessarily the bad part of town maybe not actually

be the most high fire risk the good part of town maybe for what’s perceived as

the good part of town maybe. And so we really need to think about and

actually using information in data as opposed to just our traditional

approaches and our gut instinct in terms of figuring out where we need to

focus.

And actually, you know, as they said who’s door do we not need to knock on?

And so this recipe has craft more fluid than it suggest here but really it’s kind

of focusing on as they did in New Orleans and part we need to have some

local and fire information. We also need to releverage as much and as many

different resources as you can whether it’s census data as we talked about

today local property and tax assessor’s information certificate of occupancy or

building license information land use and zoning information. There’s all

kinds of - local communities are awash in lots of data.

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The question is how do we use them. And so that’s really where we’re trying

to work and help local agencies and may not have people who have those

particular skill sets and try to create tools that are useful to them. And

ultimately we really need to review that with local subject matter experts and

local kind of people that have either been in a fire service for a long time or

just make sure kind of what we’re doing our analysis actually makes sense

with them.

Slide 44-Taking the Initiative And so really the biggest question and becomes when do we start? And really

obviously the time is now and I think we’re really at a such a pivotal moment

here.

Slide 45-How Can NFPA Help Us? And so NFPA is doing quite a lot of work to try to help create tools and then

to help local agencies. And so we’ve recently watch a new initiative to create

a new national fire data system that will function alongside and first but to

help local agencies get a better understanding of their local fire problem and

where that problem is and how they can address it.

And so that - there’s a lot of work in this space and we’re just kind of kicking

off this project so keep an eye on that. We also as was highlighted here we do

a lot of work around research reports and there’s a lot of information about

different types of fires what were the cause of the fires and a lot of drill

downs. So there’s plenty of I’m really - I’m pointing to our Web site to look at

some of our research reports. We’re also in the process of building a fair

number of analytical tools.

So we’re basically taking that no how and trying to leverage the best skills and

knowledge and different concepts that have been adopted and across the

country try to figure out how to make those available at a broader level. And

frankly also if you have specific questions regarding fire protection questions

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NFPA offers a technical question service which is free to members or it’s also

free to authorities having jurisdictions or other public sector officials.

So if you have a specific question around either a code interpretation or if you

have a specific question around some research give NFPA a call and we can

actually provide some customized service to you.

Slide 46-All Data Are Local And so finally I just want to really highlight and this is really kind of wraps up

I think what everyone’s been saying today which is that really ultimately we

talked about big data sets we talked about national level data but really in the

words of Tip O’Neill, all data are local. So all data whether it be national level

data it really becomes most significant and most important and most usable

when we actually focus at the local level and trying to use that big data to help

to do small lists in your local community.

And so that’s really what NFPA is focusing on and in terms of how we can

help provide tools as a local agency. And I think that’s something we can all

get behind. And so we really appreciate this opportunity to kind of share with

you on this.

Slide 47-Thank You So back to you Deborah and Gretchen.

Slide 48-Questions? Gretchen Gooding:Alright thank you (Matt). Let me just advance my slide. So we are going to

open up the lines for questions. And you just dial Star 1 for the Operator. And

while we’re waiting for that to queue up one thing I may anticipate you asking

is wondering if this presentation will be available online? And it will so this

recording and the presentation will be available soon on our Web site and I

have the URL there on the screen. I also want to say a big thanks to our

speakers today. I think we had a really excellent panel of speakers come

together to talk about data and making it local.

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And I also want to thank all of you for joining our call. And I really hope

today that our speakers kind of inspired you to think about how you can use

public data and tools in some places like Enigma and NFPA or even create

your own tools to possibly save lives or improve the quality of life in your

community. Hopefully this will inspire you to take action and when you do let

us know what comes with it. All right let’s open up the line.

Coordinator: And at this time I would like to relate to participants if you would like to ask a

question please press Star 1 please unmute your phone and record your first

and last name clearly when prompted. Your name is required to introduce

your question. To withdraw your question you may press Star 2. Once again at

this time if you would like to ask a question please press Star 1.

Evaluation Form Gretchen Gooding:Okay. And while we’re waiting for questions I’ll also open up our evaluation

form. So I’d really appreciate your feedback we haven’t quite done anything

like this before or having outside speakers join us for a panel. So if you want

to see more things like this have topics you’d like to see in the future we’d

appreciate your feedback in knowing that.

Coordinator: And our first question is from (James Nichols) your line is open.

(James Nichols): Hi there. You know, I think these the maps are great and they, you know,

really give some insight into some pretty complex data on this problem but

I’m just kind of wondering like what kind of tools you guys use to actually

make it actionable and like did it make like a Excel spreadsheet that people

have been going like check off the houses they go put the smoke detectors in

or did you create like issues that would get tracked. Or how did that process of

actually making it actionable work and like what are some of the tools that can

be used for that?

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Timothy McConnell: So how do you take it from data to boots on the ground getting smoke

detectors and houses is our question right?

(James Nichols): Exactly…

Timothy McConnell: This is Chief McConnell. So what we actually did is we did just what you

said we produced spreadsheets that of those neighborhoods literally every

single parcel of land in the city in those zones that were for our target areas

(unintelligent) that Oliver and his team had come up with which was a

physical map, you know, boundaries we’re using street boundaries and we

literally had firefighters go out and knock on every single door.

And while they’re doing it they’re actually gathering more data for

(unintelligible) usually that they literally record is it a vacant piece of land it is

a commercial property, is it lighted. But and those questions just continue on

until it gets to did someone answer the door. Did you put a smoke detector in?

How many did you put in the person’s information which we gather in another

method so it goes into our data systems in case you make a fire there we’ll

know that we had put a smoke detector in at some point in history and not.

But and if they don’t get into the house it’s not successfully why didn’t you

and what did you do? Did you put a door hanger on the property? So that’s

what we do if we’re not successful and it is a residence that’s occupied we put

a door hanger. Or sometimes residents will answer and say no no thank you

mine are working and so we’ll record that. But literally that’s just what you

said we do a spreadsheet of every single address in the city in those zones and

we now spread beyond those zones and are starting to do other ones but that’s

exactly how we do it.

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And they have all the information so the final sheets for the resident to say,

you know, to not hold city liable and the smoke detectors and the drills and

the ladders on every single fire truck in the city and so every company goes

out in their areas and does this and we did those target areas and, you know,

felt like we were - had more bang for our buck and getting the people who

were most in need initially.

Oliver Wise: And we - this is Oliver talking - we floated the idea of doing like a mobile app

like an RTS online app. So with that I was just or, you know, the input we got

from the fire fighters is it was just more trouble than it was worth and it was

clunky and didn’t work all the time. So they were happy and comfortable

with, you know, paper and clipboards so that’s what we went with.

Timothy McConnell: And then they come back and put the stuff in a computer. They’d rather sit

in the engine house where it’s air conditioned and put it in. If you’ve ever

been to New Orleans you’d know why. Rather we did try the app as Oliver

said and I think one day, you know, technology will get us there but, you

know, there was some issues we had with the app you get to the end you hit

Submit and it would, you know, kick out right we’ve all experienced that and

you’d have to start over. So they said look we’re out installing smoke alarms

and we’ll do this manually and then they’d go back to the firehouse and

actually install the stuff digitally.

James Nichols: …awesome.

Gretchen Gooding: Alright do we have any other questions?

Coordinator: Our next is from (Gregory Gabriel) your line is open.

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(Gregory Gabriel): Yes my name is (Gregory Gabriel) actually I work for Youth Services

Department which is a Youth Department (unintelligible). And the reason I

jumped on this call is about two months I did some maps using GIS and

actually I usually use the enterprise system or we have all our data and so did

actually use or usually what are housing income or youth under 18 household

incomes. And sort of can I believe it’s Deborah under ACS data would you

kind of elaborate more on the one year if this is five year estimate for me?

Gretchen Gooding: Yes this is Gretchen from Census Bureau. So the one year estimates are

available for geographies with a population of 65,000 or more and the five

year estimates are available for geographies that have populations less then

65,000.

(Gregory Gabriel): Oh okay so okay so you go five year back and then so which one is best

used for analysis is - would because I’m thinking more than five years so

looking at more of with more trend could the one year is it the - I mean my

question is the one year is it the updated version for the five year or they’re

too completely different data?

Gretchen Gooding: So the five years basically five one year data sets that are combined and so

you have more cases in it (unintelligible) but, you know, it depends…

Oliver Wise: But, you know sorry this is Oliver. With the…

Gretchen Gooding: …yes.

Oliver Wise: …five year you have more confidence at a more discrete level.

Gretchen Gooding: Yes.

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Olive Wiser: That’s kind of - that’s why we use the longer year estimates for this.

(Gregory Gabriel): Okay got it.

Gretchen Gooding: So yes it kind of depends if you’re looking, you know, it depends on what

geography you’re looking at are you looking for, you know, if you in New

Orleans when they were looking at the block groups they had to use the five

year data that’s not available as the one year data set, you know, it kind of

depends on your needs whether one or five years is better.

(Gregory Gabriel): Okay thank you.

Coordinator: Our next question is from (Richard Dunks) your line is open.

(Richard Dunks): Yes hello. So I teach with this example so the great example. I teach for the

City of New York and I teach, you know, data analytics and everything’s a

great opportunity. I really understood and the anecdotes that you had about the

family that was able to be saved. I think it’s a great validator of this and I’m

kind of interested in what you’ve done with the data that you’re collecting

both to kind of assessor impact as well as, you know, how many lives saved.

Obviously, you know, one life saved is great that’s what we want. But in

terms of the impact that you’ve had with this. And also kind of feeding that

back into the model to say this is how we can improve on what we’ve created.

Thank you.

Oliver Wise: Yes…

Timothy McConnell: Oliver you want to go ahead?

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Oliver Wise: …yes thanks for the good question (Richard). You know, frankly I don’t - we

haven’t done that yet we’ve had other projects on the priority list and we

haven’t done that but we certainly ought to…

Timothy McConnell: I would say so this is, you know, from the boots on the ground folks who

do this that was an incredible story that happened, you know, we put it in on

February 5 on September 15 there was a fire unfortunately smoke alarms

don’t put out fires.

But the truth of the matter is there are - and we do try and track it whenever

we’re aware but so as I said it goes into we have a fire records management

system which we used to report you heard (Unintelligible) talking about the

entry system, you know, and the National Fire reporting system and all fire

departments feed their data into it it gives us, you know, our national database

of fire incidents. But we put what smoke alarms we install. So if we have a

fire at and one that we didn’t install on we know.

But and so we can collect that data and, you know, try and utilize it to get

better anecdotes with people to understand that this stuff really, really works.

But the other thing you don’t realize is we probably save a whole lot more

lives because people’s alarm went off they woke up in the middle of the night

and they went and turned the stove off and they went back to bed and we

never did get the call because that’s how effective smoke alarms are if you’ve

had it your house. You burn toast and, you know, that it’s going off.

And the largest the number one thing that starts fires and then ones cause the

fire is cooking and it’s usually unattended, you know, somebody leaves

something on unattended. So those saves you’ll never get but I agree that

anything that we can get so people really understand that this does save lives

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is real important and but it may not really capture how many, you know, how

effective that it really is.

Mike Flowers: Hey can I add something to that too? This is Mike Flowers. So, you know, in

addition to, you know, what Oliver and Chief McConnell mentioned there’s a

couple of things I think that (Richard’s) question raises and I think they’re

really good points strong points right. One of these is that, you know, just

speaking these are the place and the smoke detectors.

The worst thing that can happen is waste to this specific thing in terms of the

insights being wrong or at least, you know, one of the risks really is that we’re

one of the bigger risks is that we’re wasting a finite amount of fire personnel

time right. If we send them to places that do have a working smoke detector

then that’s a wasted door knock to a certain degree unless you include

community engagement which is very important. But at the end of the day the

point of exercise is to get smoke detectors where they’re not right.

And part of that is this effort right to steer them to those places that are likely

to have a fruitful door knock. But in reality to make the model in an ongoing

basis more robust having that outcome the outcomes being was there or was

there not, you know, a smoke detector in place when we knock on the door a

functioning smoke detector and when we knock on the door, you know, not

(to mask) comment about battery replacement and all of that stuff. You know,

there’s a follow-on widget that really would be useful right for each individual

community.

And again we have a finite amount of government time we have a finite

amount of non-profit time and a finite amount of fire detector time and then

we kind of leverage all of these. But the fact is that there is this space in the

marketplace whatever and however you define that market for people to step

28

up and step in right and provide this service to their communities be it via, you

know, entities like the local code for America brigades or whatever, you

know, I think they make a lot of apps for doing all kinds of things.

I mean these are the kinds of things where it would be helpful for them to step

in. I know that, you know, Matt and NFPA is actively looking at, you know,

what they can do to provide this kind of follow-on technology. The idea here

in many ways was to remove a front end excuse for not doing it which was but

take this well let’s take this amazing data that’s at the federal level and put it

in a condition where somebody locally could leverage it. That is by no means

the end of the conversation. In fact in many ways I’d say it’s the kick off right

just to demonstrate how durable all of this is.

(Matt Hinds-Aldrich): Yes and this is (Matt) and so to follow-up again to where - so for now

where does data go and currently we have an infer system which takes a little

while to get information into and out of.

And so that’s where the opportunity we’re working on in terms of creating

ways to capture this data at a national level and start capturing where people

are doing these installations so we can actually start seeing are we having a

dramatic impact in terms of we put in smoke alarms we start hopefully start

capturing those un - those missing those near misses basically where someone

gets up because they were ordered by their smoke alarms. So we start seeing

that at a national level and we start seeing that we’ve blanked an area and put

in a whole bunch of smoke alarms then we start seeing reductions.

And so that all requires the more real time information and that’s really kind

of the opportunity we’re trying to capitalize on here at NFPA. So yes there’s a

lot of opportunity here and Mike is right there’s a lot of people that can do a

lot of great stuff at a local level and we’re close for American brigades and

29

what have you. But and hopefully we can work with them and collaborate in

terms of creating useful tools that can help put those - put that information in a

usable format in a consistent format into the hands of the firefighters.

Coordinator: Our next question is from Angie Cimino-Locklear your line is open.

Angie Locklear: Yes I guess I have a couple of questions. The first one is how receptive were

the firefighters to going door to door? I’m new to my position here the City of

Fayetteville and most of the time I just come off the floor.

So most of the time it’s a pain for a lot of them to go door to door to ask these

questions because they don’t feel like that’s their job. So how receptive were

the firefighters to be able to door to door?

Timothy McConnell: I’ll cover that. It was a change it’s a culture change. You know, some

people didn’t believe it was, you know, we had a little bit of push back but the

truth is I’ll use an example.

Our mission statement in the Fire Department really hasn’t changed in over 20

years and about 25 years and it says to reduce the incidents at a loss of life and

property due to fires and that’s both fire fighters and civilian lives. And it said

nowhere in there that it said we fight fires and reducing that incidence is what

we’re talking about.

And so we literally, you know, went through a good culture did a culture

change but if people understand that it’s firefighter’s lives that you’re saving

and that it’s a much, much better use of tax dollars is the change and it is what

needs to happen.

30

You know, this is nothing new for firefighters doing it it’s just maybe a little

bit more aggressive. But you go to a lot of major cities they’re doing it, you

know, Philadelphia is doing it Atlanta is doing it Baltimore, you know, doing

it very aggressive and it works it saves live.

And it beats the heck out of getting up in the middle of the night having and

not to be over dramatic but remember how we got started on this a family of

five a grandmother a mother and three beautiful children.

Angie Locklear: Right.

Timothy McConnell: So if people understand that I want to hear the argument against it. And

so…

Angie Locklear: (Unintelligible) yes.

Timothy McConnell: …we actually did go although we had always been in the prevention

business it’s actually now in our job description at the civil service that we

install smoke alarms.

(Matt Hinds-Aldrich): This is (Matt) I wanted to add a little additional to that. And that’s and

Chief is absolutely right and nothing kills morale about a program like this

and continuously knocking on the wrong doors.

And so when we can actually make sure that we’re actually getting the right

information and so that the firefighter’s time is being useful and well spend

then firefighters they get into firefighting for money for sure. And so they all

are here because they want to actually make their communities better and they

want to make them safer.

31

And so when we can put the right tools and get them knocking on the right

doors. And frankly they enjoy in most cases interacting with people. And so if

we can figure out what doors are most useful that they’re like they’re kind of

intelligent door knocking as their sometimes referred to firefighters in almost

all cases will start to appreciate kind of and be more receptive to what their

whole program.

Mike Flowers: And then one other thing if I just can add to that. There is in fact I mean I’d

defer of course to Chief McConnell and (Matt) right from your experience at

AFP but there is in fact tactical value and the fire department is doing this

because you can also send this out to the, you know, the community if you

want or you can have (NGOs) get involved and give them the list and have

them do the door knocks instead.

But one of the values of having fire personnel out is that these - if you’re

picking the right doors to knock on then you’re picking those places, you

know, when meshed with local data those places that are likely to go, you

know, to have emergency events.

And this in many ways is a wonderful way for First Responder personnel to

get really critical information about the places that they ultimately will be

going to an exceedingly emergency circumstances in a more sedate way so

that they can learn a lot more about the residency that they serve fire houses,

you know, serve a specific community and the more they can get to know that

community say there’s somebody who, you know, is paraplegic on the third

floor or whatever.

You know, I mean these are the kinds of things that would be very, very

helpful for our fire personnel to know before they have to actually rush there

32

with the fire is going so that, you know, they can protect themselves as much

as they can protect the community.

Oliver Wise: Yes following up our fire - this is Oliver - our fire the supervisors who

supervise at district are also the same firefighters who are doing that outreach

in their district. So they have, you know, they have accountability for their

neighborhoods.

One and then two we actually - we did a really - last August was the 10th

anniversary of Katrina and on that day the - we did a really big push for our

volunteerism effort. And this was one of the things we did was to have

volunteers work hand in hand with firefighters and people from the Red Cross

to sell their smoke alarms.

So it was us also, you know, I think I totally agree with Mike like on a day-to-

day sense this makes - there’s an awful lot of benefit that comes with having

the First Responders actually be the people that do this work.

But, you know, it’s also a great way to engage in the community in a really

productive way too. So it’s kind of like a one off thing it was I think it was

quite productive. And then third, you know, all of this comes down to this is

management and I think the Chief you kind of heard when he talked just a

minute ago that’s the way maybe he would talk, you know, in a roll call

before a shift.

But we got one heck of a Chief here and it does take a really transformative

Chief to shift the perspective of what it means to be a firefighter. So in terms I

think the data for this is utterly transferable everywhere but what, you know,

what you have to have what’s totally indispensable to all of this is you need

33

really good leadership who, you know, isn’t afraid to change the culture of the

place.

((Crosstalk))

Gretchen Gooding: This is Gretchen…

((Crosstalk))

Gretchen Gooding: …we are at 3 o’clock. Operator how many people - how many questions

are in queue?

Coordinator: I’m showing no further questions at this time…

Gretchen Gooding: Perfect. I think our - the original question asker I think you had more than

one part did you want to get to your next part of your question? All right

might have lost her.

Angie Locklear: ….(ways to do that)? My second question was is there any information on

(CO) along to follow along with the smoke alarms because that seems to be

something really important now a days?

Oliver Wise: Yes this is Oliver Chief McConnell had to drop off unfortunately so he’d

probably be the best person to…

Angie Locklear: Okay.

Oliver Wise: …take that as a practitioner. Sorry about that.

Angie Locklear: It’s okay all right…

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Mike Flowers: Oliver one - I mean just to add to, you know, and I’ll point to Jeremy on this

but if there’s any - one of the beautiful things about this one of the many

beautiful things about this effort is that, you know, the underlying data is

really lifestyle questions in a lot of ways like, you know, and one of those

questions would be do you have a smoke alarm right…

Jeremy Krinsley: Right and I can actually just jump in…

Mike Flowers: …and…

Jeremy Krinsley: …specifically there is actually (unintelligible) asked question about carbon

monoxide so just you can run with that Mike but there is one.

Angie Locklear: Okay.

Mike Flowers: …so there you go right and so just a matter of tweaking the model right the

triangulation point where you’re like instead of focusing on whether or not

there’s smoke detectors the data is there for you to do the same thing for the

detector.

Angie Locklear: Okay right thank you guys so very much.

Gretchen Gooding: Alright we are over our hour. Again I want to thank you all of you who

called in and also so much - thank you so much to our speakers. I think this

was a really interesting conversation we usually don’t go over our time with

questions so it’s really cool that we had a good conversation following the

presentations. And again this will be posted online this recording and then

also there’s the evaluation if you haven’t had a chance yet to fill that out.

35

Man 1: Excellent thank you everyone…

Man 2: Yes thank you.

Man 3: Thank you all…

(Group): Thank you.

((Crosstalk))

Man 4: (Yes).

Man 3: Bye.

Man 4: Bye.

Gretchen Gooding: Bye bye.

Coordinator: This now concludes today’s conference all lines may disconnect at this time.

END