West Pulaski Fire Department is rated as ISO Class 6/9 , also known as Public Protection Classification (PPC)

-ISO CLASS 6= If you are closest to WPFD Fire Station 1, 2, or 3 with a distance of  5 road miles or less .

-ISO CLASS 9=If you are closest to WPFD Fire Station 4 OR if you are located greater than  5 road miles from WPFD  Station 1, 2, or 3.

An ISO Classification is a rating assigned by the Insurance Services Organization (ISO) to evaluate a fire department’s service capabilites based within its physical boundary areas.  Many insurance companies utilize this rating in determining the cost of homeowner insurance policies. Not all companies use this rating system, contact your local insurance agent to determine how ISO ratings affect your policy.

WPFD is continually making great strides to improve as a rural volunteer fire deparment by investing in our Personnel (training), Vehicles,  Tools,  Fire Stations, and more to get the most credit for our vast capabilities to strive for improved classications at our next evaluation period.

Some criteria used to evaluate a fire departments fire suppression capabilities include whether the department is paid (active standby) or volunteer (variable staff on-call), manpower volume, apparatus (type and use of fire trucks), training, capabilities (services and skills), mutual aid (help from other stations/departments), water sources (wet hydrants-water system/ dry hydrants-pond/water shuttle-tanker trucks), maintenance history, timed response benchmarks, and much more. Thorough requirements are reviewed on a regular basis between fire departments and the ISO group to ensure upgrades to local water systems (example- pressurized hydrants), improved vehicles,  administrative management- emergency planning/preparedness  and training are given credit to continually work toward the improvement of a departments ISO Classification.

More info about ISO Ratings from www.iso.org:

ISO collects information on a community’s public fire protection and analyzes the data using our Fire Suppression Rating Schedule (FSRS) and then assign a Public Protection Classification from 1 to 10. Class 1 generally represents superior property fire protection, and Class 10 indicates that the area’s fire-suppression program doesn’t meet ISO’s minimum criteria.

By classifying a community’s ability to suppress fires, ISO provides crucial information for understanding the entire landscape of risk associated with a specific property and has extensive information on more than 44,000 fire-response jurisdictions.

Fire is the largest single cause of property loss in the United States. In the last decade, fires have caused direct losses of more than $120 billion and countless billions more in related costs.

But that’s not all. Every year, fires injure more than 20,000 people. And every year, more than 3,000 Americans die in building fires.

A community committed to saving lives and property needs trained firefighters, proper equipment, and adequate supplies of water. Insurance companies consider it good public policy — and good business — to promote and encourage the efforts of individual communities to improve their fire-protection services. That’s why, for almost a century, U.S. property insurance companies have funded key initiatives aimed at fire prevention and fire mitigation.

In the battle against fire losses, one of the insurance industry’s most important weapons is the Public Protection Classification (PPCTM) program from ISO.

The PPC program provides important, up-to-date information about municipal fire-protection services throughout the country. A community’s investment in fire mitigation is a proven and reliable predictor of future fire losses. So insurance companies use PPC information to help establish fair premiums for fire insurance — generally offering lower premiums in communities with better protection.

By offering economic benefits for communities that invest in their firefighting services, the PPC program provides a real incentive for improving and maintaining public fire protection. And that incentive produces results.

The program also provides help for fire departments and other public officials as they plan for, budget, and justify improvements.