What safety culture actually means on the fireground

"Safety culture" gets used loosely in the fire service. The documents the phrase comes from are specific. They define the term, name the behaviors that need to change, and say who is responsible for changing them. This page is a plain walk through what they say.

The term was borrowed, and it was borrowed for a reason

Safety culture is not a fire service invention. The National Safety Culture Change Initiative report, developed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs through a partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration and published in April 2015, traces the term to the nuclear industry, which coined it after the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 to describe what had been missing in both events. The report describes it as a concept encompassing "a combination of managerial, organizational, and social factors" that contribute to accidents and near misses.

Applied to a fire department, the report defines a safety culture as reflecting "the values, norms, assumptions and expectations regarding safety." It also draws a line between culture and climate that is worth keeping straight: climate is the set of policies, procedures and practices that support safety in an organization, and it is more temporal and local to a particular unit, whereas culture is broader and spans the entire organization and in some cases the whole profession. A department can change its climate with a memo. Culture is what survives the memo.

Why the fire service went looking for the idea at all

The opening finding of the NSCCI report is the reason the project existed. Despite improvements in personal protective equipment, apparatus safety devices, wider availability of training, greater emphasis on firefighter health and wellness, and decreases in both the number of fires and dollar loss due to fires, the report states that "the rate of on-duty firefighter death and injury has remained relatively unchanged in the past four decades."

That is the argument in one sentence. Four decades of better equipment did not move the rate. Whatever is left is not made of gear.

The report is candid about where it thinks the remainder sits. It cites the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation's assertion that the culture of the fire and emergency service is a major contributor to the fatal trend in firefighter health and safety, and it quotes a line from the report on the nine firefighters killed in Charleston, South Carolina in 2007: "The cultural lessons may be the most important and also the hardest to embrace."

The report follows that quotation with the mechanism it implies: when a department rewards heroic acts that come at a greater-than-usual level of risk, the message carried inside the culture is that those behaviors are acceptable and will be rewarded. That is a specific, checkable claim about how a department's award list shapes its fireground behavior, and it is the sort of thing "safety culture" is meant to name.

The 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives

The initiatives are the fire service's standing list of what has to change. They were produced at the Firefighter Life Safety Summit convened by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, held in Tampa, Florida in March 2004, and they anchor the Foundation's Everyone Goes Home program. The text below is as printed on the Foundation's own 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives poster for the program.

1. Define and advocate the need for a cultural change within the fire service relating to safety; incorporating leadership, management, supervision, accountability and personal responsibility.
2. Enhance the personal and organizational accountability for health and safety throughout the fire service.
3. Focus greater attention on the integration of risk management with incident management at all levels, including strategic, tactical, and planning responsibilities.
4. All firefighters must be empowered to stop unsafe practices.
5. Develop and implement national standards for training, qualifications, and certification (including regular recertification) that are equally applicable to all firefighters based on the duties they are expected to perform.
6. Develop and implement national medical and physical fitness standards that are equally applicable to all firefighters, based on the duties they are expected to perform.
7. Create a national research agenda and data collection system that relates to the initiatives.
8. Utilize available technology wherever it can produce higher levels of health and safety.
9. Thoroughly investigate all firefighter fatalities, injuries, and near misses.
10. Grant programs should support the implementation of safe practices and/or mandate safe practices as an eligibility requirement.
11. National standards for emergency response policies and procedures should be developed and championed.
12. National protocols for response to violent incidents should be developed and championed.
13. Firefighters and their families must have access to counseling and psychological support.
14. Public education must receive more resources and be championed as a critical fire and life safety program.
15. Advocacy must be strengthened for the enforcement of codes and the installation of home fire sprinklers.
16. Safety must be a primary consideration in the design of apparatus and equipment.

Two things are worth noticing about that list. The first is that Initiative 1 is not one item among sixteen. The NSCCI report calls it "an overarching initiative, acknowledging that the organizational culture of the fire service must undergo a change to accept the other 15 recommendations," and states that without understanding the culture inside an organization, it is likely that the changes called for in the other fifteen cannot be successfully implemented or sustained.

The second is Initiative 4. "All firefighters must be empowered to stop unsafe practices" is the shortest line on the list and the one that most directly describes a fireground. It is a claim about who may speak, and to whom, while something is going wrong.

Where the report says the change has to happen

The NSCCI working group did not stop at describing culture. It named the areas where behavior has to be worked on, and built sets of behaviors for chief officers, company officers and firefighters within each. The report lists those areas as situational awareness, individual responsibility, leadership, health and wellness, training, vehicle operations, seat belt usage, recruiting, and environmental factors. It is explicit that risk-taking behaviors are an organizational problem and not one that lies solely with firefighters' behaviors, so strategies to change firefighter behavior need to address multiple levels of influence.

A few of those areas carry particularly concrete content:

• Health and wellness. The report states that almost half of all firefighter fatalities in the United States are cardiac-related, attributing the figure to the USFA, and that the majority of those deaths are found to be related to pre-existing and pre-identified medical conditions. It notes that the necessary standards have been developed and adopted, yet there are still organizations without programs of this nature and tens of thousands of active firefighters who have not been medically certified for emergency duty. It names the two inhibiting factors directly: cost, and the belief that a substantial percentage of members would be unable to meet the requirements.
• Situational awareness. The report adopts Endsley's 1988 definition, "the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future," and frames the practical question it exists to answer: whether firefighters should risk their lives searching for potential occupants under extreme fire conditions when there is no clear indication the building is occupied.
• Accountability. The report distinguishes positive accountability, which is about ensuring the proper policies and programs are in place beforehand, from negative accountability, which begins with explaining why they were not in place after a preventable event. It adds that the most undesirable type comes from outside the organization, in legal proceedings.
• Leadership. The report is blunt that effective leadership must go beyond issuing directives and policy statements, because members of an organization can generally tell the difference between policies written to satisfy a duty and legitimate efforts to lead. It notes there are many examples of departments that issued policies based on recommended safety and health standards and then failed to demonstrate a true commitment to them.

The resistance is part of the finding, not an obstacle to it

One of the more useful passages in the report is the one that takes departmental resistance seriously rather than treating it as an inconvenience. It observes that resistance to change, even internally initiated change, is often cited as a significant characteristic of fire service culture, expressed "with a mixture of pride and amusement" by slogans such as "200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress."

The report's conclusion from this is not that the culture should be dismantled. It argues the opposite: that change can only be accomplished by convincing firefighters at every level that it is both desirable and necessary, and that the adjustments can be made without compromising any of the highly valued aspects of the culture. It states that the document focuses on integrating safety into the fire service culture without diminishing any of its existing positive aspects. It closes on Hofstede: "Uniformed organizations have to balance their attempts to introduce new ways of working ... with the necessity of preserving traditional basics. Changing uniformed cultures requires patience and wisdom."

What the numbers look like now

The measure all of this is held against is the on-duty fatality count the U.S. Fire Administration has published annually since 1986. The stated objective of the study is to identify and analyze all on-duty firefighter fatalities in order to increase understanding of their causes and how they can be prevented.

As of the USFA's current firefighter fatalities reporting, 72 firefighters died while on duty in 2024. The 2025 figure stands at 81, broken down as 33 career firefighters, 39 volunteer firefighters, 4 wildland firefighters and 5 part-time firefighters; the USFA marks that year as provisional pending release of its full Firefighter Fatalities in the United States (2025) report, so it should be read as a count still subject to revision rather than a final number.

Those are people, and each one has a report behind it. The reason the safety culture literature keeps returning to counts like these is the argument made at the top of the NSCCI report: the equipment kept improving and the rate did not follow. That gap is the whole subject.

A short working definition

Reading the source documents together, safety culture on a fireground is not a mood or a slogan. It is the set of shared expectations that decides, before anyone arrives, which risks a crew will take without being asked to, which ones a firefighter is permitted to interrupt out loud, and which behaviors a department will honor afterward. Initiative 1 says the culture must change. Initiative 4 says everyone must be empowered to stop unsafe practices. The NSCCI report says both have to be worked from the bottom up and the top down at once, because the alternative, a top-down approach alone, is likely to encounter resistance for every individual change in behavior that is introduced.

Sources

• National Safety Culture Change Initiative: Study of Behavioral Motivation on Reduction of Risk-Taking Behaviors in the Fire and Emergency Service (FA-342), developed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs through a partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration, April 2015.
• Everyone Goes Home, National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. The 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives text above follows the program's 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives poster.
• Annual Report on Firefighter Fatalities in the United States, U.S. Fire Administration.
• Summit date and location for the 2004 Firefighter Life Safety Summit as recorded by Buildings on Fire.

Quotations from the NSCCI report are reproduced from the published U.S. Fire Administration PDF. The Brunacini passage is quoted in that report at pages 6 to 7 of the cited 2008 original.