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.
10 Comments
chiefjaybob · October 1, 2024 at 8:04 am
I had to go through this twice; once within a year of my appointment, and once just before I left.
I was pretty shocked and proud when the first rating went from 7/9 to 5/9. Record keeping was the biggest reason.
I understand that a lot of insurance companies are moving away from ISO, as they see it as more of a pencil-whipping record keeping thing. I’ve heard they are using an historic loss per zip code model.
Divemedic · October 1, 2024 at 8:47 am
Record keeping is an important indicator of how well a department is maintaining its equipment. If they ignore paperwork, they are probably ignoring other things like hose and hydrant testing.
Some insurance companies are using other methods for determining risk. State Farm, for example, has had its own proprietary system for determining risk since 2000.
It's just Boris · October 1, 2024 at 8:32 am
Huh.. the things you learn.
I knew we had a hydrant right out front (one reason we bought the place, as this is fire country) but I never knew about the iso rating.
Now that I know it though (1), it just makes the recent insurance premium increases more infuriating.
Divemedic · October 1, 2024 at 8:48 am
ISO is just one of the data points used, mostly because fire is only one hazard, and one that is decreasing all of the time, thanks to better building codes. There are other datapoints as well.
oldvet50 · October 1, 2024 at 10:27 am
Learn something new everyday. I thought it was a standardization organization that has been around since 1947. https://www.iso.org/home.html
Divemedic · October 1, 2024 at 10:55 am
Different ISO
Exile1981 · October 1, 2024 at 11:55 am
A few years back our rural fire department bought a new fire truck, there was no issues with the old one but to keep their rating the primary engine had to be under a certain age.
Nick Flandrey · October 1, 2024 at 8:37 pm
My BOL is in a rural lake community with about 100 lots, and 60 homes/cabins. We have our own VFD, and while the truck is a little bit better than a pickup, (it’s set up for brush fire fighting), staffing is literally about 3 guys and a retired female. They have mutual aid arrangements with surrounding areas, and did get called out a couple of weeks ago. I know they go thru and start all the gear, run all the pumps, and document it regularly. They have a grant provided gennie for the station. We’re talking about trying for a grant to get fiber pulled to the VFD to upgrade comms (which could benefit everyone once the fiber is there, no reason not to build out for residential FTTH.) Staffing is the biggest issue, as most of the younger residents are weekenders or holiday only visitors. I’m 58 and only up there every third weekend, so my involvement capability is minimal.
Despite the seemingly dire state of affairs, at least there is a CHANCE that you can get a fire contained, or a patient stabilized, while waiting for the nearest town to respond. This is very much an “anything is better than nothing” situation.
They may not be pros, but they are trying to serve their community, and they succeed more than they fail.
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