Preventable Causes of Structure Fire: Expanding Awareness and Education
Livable City Year 2017-2018 – City of Tacoma
UW Faculty: D.C. Grant, Institute of Technology, UW Tacoma
City Project Lead: Allen Estes, Fire Department
Project summary
The goal of this project was to create an accessible and hands-on outreach program to help the Tacoma Fire Department connect with its community. Ultimately, the Fire Department wanted to provide constituents with resources to embrace fire safety. But they also wanted to engage the community in the mission of the Fire Department: to
protect people, property, and the environment.
Our process was guided by a primary finding – that fire safety education needs to be interactive and engaging in order to be internalized by Tacoma’s youth. The product supplies the Fire Department’s outreach program with an educational website with training materials and interactive online applications using fire safety activities. We developed it using the industry’s latest standards, which ensures that the program is timely, compliant, and enriching.
As a team of students serving the community, the main objective for this project was to create an application that would impact the lives of the students in the Tacoma’s Public Schools. We also sought to reduce the costs for the Tacoma Fire Department’s Outreach Program.
With this interactive application, Tacoma Public schools will have the opportunity to participate in the outreach program on their own time. As an added incentive, participating schools will compete for the big reward: a fire engine Visit from the Tacoma Fire Department.
The next phase of this application will include handing the application over to the Tacoma Fire Department so they can collect the needed data to help continue the fight against preventable fires. The application will also be available to all the residents of the Tacoma community and inspire some of Tacoma’s youth to one day became our community’s future fire fighters.
Part of the 2017-2018 Livable City Year partnership between the University of Washington and the City of Tacoma.
See all Livable City Year projects in Tacoma that UW students and faculty worked on during the year-long partnership.
