Fire department’s Community Risk Reduction branch provides personalized approach to emergency prevention

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The Charlottesville Fire Department’s Community Risk Reduction branch has been working over the past year to identify areas of inequity in Charlottesville neighborhoods in hopes of preventing emergencies before they happen.

Joe Powers, Deputy Chief of Community Risk Reduction for Charlottesville Fire Department, said that community risk reduction focuses mainly on public engagement, community partnerships, and comprehensive risk assessment.

“Recently, the fire service as an industry started to move towards community risk reduction and less focus on fire prevention,” Powers said. “Charlottesville is one of the few departments throughout the country that has a ‘true’ community risk reduction branch.”

For example, if an area of the city had a high prevalence of heart attacks, it would be important to provide education about healthy habits to that specific neighborhood and teach residents hands-only CPR techniques, Powers said.

In 2017, Charlottesville Fire Department went through a self assessment and strategic planning process and determined that the community would benefit from a risk reduction model. The department hired Powers and created its Community Risk Reduction Branch in January 2020.

“Rather than looking at it from an umbrella of the entire city, I like to look at the neighborhoods. So we take each of the 19 established neighborhoods in the city and we understand what their primary challenges are, and we start to deploy resources,” Powers said. “The important part about community risk reduction is it’s not a blanketed approach to the city, it’s not a program just because we think it’s right, it’s a program because we’ve looked at the data, we’ve identified the problem.”

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