Government

BCEGS Schedule

Not only does the Insurance Services Office (ISO) rate fire departments, it also rates building code effectiveness. The Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule (BCEGS)  assesses community building codes and their enforcement, with special emphasis on mitigation of losses from hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and other natural hazards.

Areas with well-enforced, up-to-date codes have a better loss experience, which can be reflected in lower insurance rates. Lessening catastrophe-related damage and ultimately lowering insurance costs provides an incentive for local and state governments to enforce their building codes rigorously — especially as they relate to windstorm and earthquake damage.

Just like the ISO fire protection class, the BCEGS rating is based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the best and 10 being the worst. ISO develops advisory rating credits that apply to ranges of BCEGS classifications (1-3, 4-7, 8-9, 10). So a community that is in the 1-3 zone would receive the best rate credit, while on in the 8-9 would be charged more for insurance. A community that refuses to participate would fall into the same category as a eight or a nine (called a nine eight, and written as 98).

The BCEGS program assesses a community’s building code enforcement in three areas:

  • Code administration
  • Plan review
  • Field inspection

The classification uses 1,243 data points to calculate two scores: One for one- and two-family residential construction, and another for commercial or industrial construction. The scores are assigned a scaled class rating of 1 (exemplary commitment to building code enforcement) to 10. The classifications apply to communities under the jurisdiction of each building code department. Here is the nationwide breakdown of BCEGS ratings:

The ratings vary by state. In Florida, the lowest BCEGS rating is in the Florida Keys, which has a 5 rating. The rest of the state is 4 or higher. Most of the coastal counties are a 1 or a 2. In Tennessee, more than half of the state is rated a 6 or lower.

The states with the lowest ratings are Kansas, South Dakota, and New Mexico, which are all an 8 for residential buildings. The highest rating for residential is California as a 3. Florida averages to a 4.

Keep in mind that the BCEGS doesn’t just rate building codes, but is also a rating of how vigorously they are enforced. California receives such a high rating not only because of their strict earthquake code, but in how strict they are in enforcing the code.

The BCEGS is an important datapoint used by insurance companies in determining the risk they face when insuring property against natural hazards.

By Divemedic, ago

ISO Ratings

Every fire department in the nation is ranked and graded by insurance companies. The Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating, also known as the Public Protection Classification (PPC) program, is a measurement of each community’s fire preparedness. The ISO rating is based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the best and 10 being the worst.

The ISO rating of your area is important for calculating insurance rates. Fire and lightning account for almost 25 percent of all homeowners insurance losses, with the average fire and lightning claim resulting in $83,519 in insured losses. Insurance companies know that fire losses are the single biggest cause of large insurance payouts. This is why the ISO rating is a major factor in determining your insurance rates.

The rating is based on data collected about the quality of public fire protection, including: emergency communications, fire department capabilities, water supply systems, and community efforts to reduce the risk of fire. Each thing that your community does to handle fire preparedness earns points. The points are totaled, and the score is used to determine the ISO rating of the area.

Things that you wouldn’t usually think of earn points. A backup generator for the radio repeaters that the fire department uses, the amount of fire hose on the local fire engine, the average distance of homes to the closest fire hydrant, all of these are accounted for when the score is calculated.

Each department is inspected every ten years, and sometimes upon request, to determine their ISO rating. When I worked for the fire department, we were inspected about a year before I retired. I was the coordinator to ensure that our fire trucks got the maximum points that they could for the inspection. (That’s what having a Bachelor’s in Public Safety Management gets you- more work.) I took a copy of the sheet that listed what points were available and made sure that we got the maximum points. Things like how many gallons of foam, how many feet of 3 inch hose, and how many spare air tanks for breathing apparatus were carried on each truck were all worth points. I spent months doing an inventory and placing equipment on the trucks to make sure we got as many points as possible.

Calculating the ISO Rating

The ISO uses a manual called the Fire Suppression Rating Schedule (FSRS) to determine what points your community scores. There are four different areas where your department can earn points:

  • Fire Department: The amount and condition of fire trucks, what equipment they carry, and the training level of firefighters is used to calculate points. For example: a full time firefighter counts for three times as many points as a volunteer. How complete are the department’s training records? How often does the department maintain the trucks, hose, and other equipment? All of those things earn points, and the points earned in this category make up 50% of your community’s score.
  • Water Supply: Does your community use ponds for water supply, or does it have city water? How many hydrants are there? How far are houses from those hydrants, on average? Is there water storage? How much pressure? Over a two hour period, what is the minimum water volume in gallons per minute that the fire department can deliver to any point in their service area? Water supply is 40% of your community’s score.
  • Communications: How well does the fire department receive and respond to emergency calls? How many call takers are there in the emergency call center? Does the center have computer aided dispatch? Does the call center and radio system have a backup generator? Communications is 10% of your community’s score.
  • Risk Reduction: How does your community prevent fires? Fire safety education, fire prevention techniques, building codes, and fire investigation all play a role here. This category is an “extra credit” category, since the rest of the score already adds up to 100%.

Any given community adds up to a total possible 105.5%. The biggest category is the fire department, which accounts for 50 percent of the score, but the hardest to improve is an area’s water supply. A lack of fire hydrants and access to an adequate amount of water cannot be easily remedied and would require extensive infrastructure development to fix. That, combined with the fact that volunteers earn far fewer points than do full time city departments, make the ISO ratings for rural communities served by volunteer departments much lower than their city based counterparts. The reason for this is simple- insurance companies have far more and greater fire losses in rural areas than they do in urban areas.

An ISO rating of a 10 is no fire department to speak of at all. A rating of a 9, the easiest one to get, is essentially a volunteer department consisting of four volunteers with a pickup truck and a fire extinguisher. The hardest jumps to make for a fire department is the jump from a 9 to an 8, and the jump from a 2 to a 1.

An ISO rating of 1 is the rarest, with only about 1 percent of fire departments earning the top rating. There are less than 500 fire departments nationwide that have an ISO 1 rating. In Florida, departments that are ISO 1 include: Orlando, Palm Beach, Kissimmee, Miami-Dade, Clermont, Deland, Key West, Pompano Beach, Lauderhill, Melbourne, Apopka, Stuart, Miami Beach, Lake Mary, Fort Lauderdale, and others.

It gets even more complicated. Some departments serve an area with hydrants, but also include an area without them. In those cases the department gets a hybrid rating, with areas that are more than 5 road miles from the nearest fire station, or more than 1,000 feet from a fire hydrant receiving a higher ISO rating than those within those limits. For example, one department in Central Florida that I am aware of is an ISO 5/9. That is, the department is an ISO 5 in areas within 5 road miles of a fire station and 1,000 linear feet of a hydrant, but an ISO 9 outside of those limits.

A great example of this is in Osceola county, which has a rating of 3/10. Meaning that if you are in Osceola county are are more than 5 miles from a station or 1,000 feet from a hydrant, the ISO says you really don’t have a fire department. I would be pissed, because you pay the same taxes and fire fees, but the county has written your property off if you are in a rural area. Those poor bastards in Yeehaw Junction are paying for things that they will never receive.

In general, residential fire insurance rates aren’t affected by any ISO rating that is better than a 4. ISO ratings of 1 through 3 primarily affect commercial and industrial insurance rates. This means that a department in a residential community would be wasting money chasing any rating better than a 4 or a 5.

You can find the ISO rating of your local area by going to your fire department’s web page. Nearly every department lists their ISO rating there. If they don’t have it on the website, you can call and ask them.

By Divemedic, ago

Tyrants

From the Interwebs comes this notice:

The wannabe dictator cites the state law 870.044 almost verbatim, but leaves out the important part:

870.044 Automatic emergency measures.—Whenever the public official declares that a state of emergency exists, pursuant to s. 870.043, the following acts shall be prohibited during the period of said emergency throughout the jurisdiction:

(1) The sale of, or offer to sell, with or without consideration, any ammunition or gun or other firearm of any size or description.

(2) The intentional display, after the emergency is declared, by or in any store or shop of any ammunition or gun or other firearm of any size or description.

(3) The intentional possession in a public place of a firearm by any person, except a duly authorized law enforcement official or person in military service acting in the official performance of her or his duty.

Note that the pertinent part was left out- the state of emergency has to be declared pursuant to 870.043. What does that particular law have to say on the subject? State statute 870.043 reads:

870.043 Declaration of emergency.—Whenever the sheriff or designated city official determines that there has been an act of violence or a flagrant and substantial defiance of, or resistance to, a lawful exercise of public authority and that, on account thereof, there is reason to believe that there exists a clear and present danger of a riot or other general public disorder, widespread disobedience of the law, and substantial injury to persons or to property, all of which constitute an imminent threat to public peace or order and to the general welfare of the jurisdiction affected or a part or parts thereof, he or she may declare that a state of emergency exists within that jurisdiction or any part or parts thereof.

The state of emergency in Florida wasn’t due to an act of violence or a flagrant and substantial defiance of, or resistance to, a lawful exercise of public authority. It was due to an approaching hurricane. Therefore, the entire declaration of this tyrant was unlawful.

This is what tyrants do- they twist the law to suit their own purposes.

By Divemedic, ago

You Can’t Live There.

Peter and Aesop both ask the same question: Should the government ‘let’ people build a house in an area known to be prone to disasters like hurricanes? The reasons that they give:

  • it costs local and state authorities huge amounts to maintain access to such areas to protect them, fire and rescue departments to aid those living there during disasters, etc.;
  • Insurance companies typically won’t insure against hazards that are so easily foreseen, meaning that either they have to be compelled to do so through legislation, and/or subsidized to do so from taxpayers’ coffers, and/or have state-aided insurance plans such as flood insurance to cover the risks they will not.
  • There’s all the infrastructure (roads, power, water, sewage processing and disposal, maintenance, etc.).  That’s not just capital cost to provide them all, but ongoing running costs year in, year out.
  • There’s the expense of subsidizing and/or providing insurance coverage.
  • There’s the burden of restoring services to such areas when natural disasters disrupt them (which also means the resources devoted to doing that can’t be used in other areas where they may be needed, imposing additional delays and costs).
  • There’s the additional bureaucracy and complexity of legislation and/or regulation accompanying all of the above.

These positions seem reasonable. They are also tyrannical and wrong. If we were to grant government the power to declare that you can’t live somewhere because it is too expensive to provide services there, then you open the door to government getting involved and ruling over your entire life.

Owning guns is too dangerous, and therefore illegal. So is smoking, drinking alcohol, eating salt, eating fatty foods, and not exercising 1 hour per day. SCUBA and sky diving, contact sports, owning a car that is capable of speeds more than 40 miles per hour, as well as roller skates, bicycles, and air conditioning (Climate Change!) are all dangerous.

Governments were created, among other things, to provide for the common defense. Services like fire, police, and rescue are properly part of that response. Don’t tell me how we should have for profit fire and rescue services- we tried that, and it plain doesn’t work. (Seriously- read the link before you comment)

Water, power, roads, and all of those other services are paid for by companies that have been granted a monopoly by the government. They aren’t paid for by taxes in many cases, but by fees passed on to consumers.

Back to the subject- when the government decides that it’s most cost effective to make everyone live in tenements in downtown Detroit, come back and explain to me how you didn’t see that coming. But hey, you can sign on to the Green New Deal if you prefer.

By Divemedic, ago

The Battle of the Courts

We are in a situation where the courts are divided along ideological lines. In a continuation of yesterday’s post, we see that a judge in Nort Dakota has declared that, since the state constitution was established to ensure life, liberty, and happiness, women have a constitutional right to kill their unborn children, if that is what makes them happy.

So again, why can’t that same logic be used as an excuse to own artillery pieces, kill people that you don’t like, or use LSD while driving down the highway, if that is what makes you happy?

It is my opinion that judges walk into the court room with a preconceived idea as to how they want to decide the case, and then twist the law and the constitution to fit that view.

By Divemedic, ago