The Birmingham Fire Department improves its ISO rating

BIRMINGHAM — The Birmingham Fire Department recently earned a Class 2 rating from its five-year Insurance Services Office review. ISO ratings are graded 1-10, with 1 being the best. This is an improvement from Class 3 training, which the department has held for the past 18 years.

Four and a half years ago, the Birmingham Fire Department started working on improving its ISO rating. The ISO rating change does not go into effect until Aug.1.

“I wanted to show the public that the investment in the Fire Department here … paid off,” Birmingham Fire Chief Paul Wells said.

The Birmingham Fire Department is now among the top 1.5% of all fire departments in Michigan.

Matthew Bartalino, the assistant fire chief of the Birmingham Fire Department, said that, for fire departments, “the only thing we can really rank each other against is this preparedness that the ISO evaluates. It’s really hard to just randomly say how you rank against neighboring departments or even departments across the country, because we’re not all the same.”

The ISO rating is based on several areas including fire prevention, water availability, fire code policies and more.

Wells emphasized the importance of training hard in order to get the rating they want. Birmingham has adopted the newest fire code, the 2021 edition of the International Fire Code.

In addition to fire emergencies, the Birmingham Fire Department responds to medical and hazardous materials emergencies, such as explosive gas leaks and carbon monoxide incidents.

Birmingham Fire Department’s emergency call response time is the quickest in the state. Due to its two strategic locations and fully staffed advanced life support stations, the average emergency call response of the Birmingham Fire Department is three minutes.

Effective Aug. 1, the department’s rating will lower, which could potentially be financially beneficial for residents.

Since ISO ratings are used by many insurance agencies to determine insurance rate coverage for residential and commercial structures, owners should ask their insurance carriers if this rating change will reduce their premium.

Wells said he can not definitively say a set amount that this rating change could save people or if it will decrease the premium at all. That depends on several factors. But the possibility will be there after Aug. 1.

ISO ratings are reevaluated every five years. However, a department can elect to do it early if they are confident in improvements. This year, Birmingham elected to be reevaluated about six months early.

Wells said he plans to be reevaluated again in four years.

“We are going to keep working towards that goal by looking at the data they provided in the report and make those improvements to the way we do things, to our water system, to our equipment and to everything else,” provided in the report, Wells said. “It is going to take four years to get to where we need to be.”