By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Fire Chief Steven Beer noted that the report provided by Five Bugle this month on the county's volunteer fire departments wasn't approached the same way as the process his department has been going through.
"It wasn't data driven," Beer said. "Coming from the accreditation process, the continuous improvement model, data doesn't lie. When you have the good data and you can make some good decisions. What I've heard already and what I've been witnessing over the weekend already, it's become emotional. It's become opinionated on some of the decisionmaking. If you have a data driven report, it takes a lot of that opinion based decision making out of the process."
Obtaining the data to make those decisions needs to happen at the beginning of the call.
"It starts with when the person calls 911," Beer said. "Everything is recorded at the 911 center, from the nature of the call to the time of the call to the responding units to the number of calls out in each of the territories, to the first unit on scene. These are all recorded. I think you get GIS involved into a lot of different things and you start geocoding each of the calls, the types of calls, how many of the actual calls were for mutual aid and then it starts painting a picture."
If the county wants to decide how and where to invest in infrastructure, that data is key. It has been in the city thus far.
"You're setting yourself up for the next 50 to 100 years," Beer said. "You have to get these decisions right. GIS is a great resource. Everything that we do as far as our fire department, our engineering department is just phenomenal with the data that we can extract from them and actually paint us a clear picture."
The first year the city really had good data for an entire year was their 2020 report. Beer said putting together the data for accreditation was three years in the making.
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