West Pulaski Fire Department is pleased to announce that our ISO Public Protection Rating changed to ISO PPC Class 4 for all property owners living 5 road miles from a WPFD fire station, effective February 1, 2019.
WPFD continues to improve our services and has invested in equipment, training, and capabilities to serve our communities better. We are proud of this improved rating and we will work harder to continue improvements that get us to an even better future rating.
ISO PPC Class Ratings:
- Class 4 – Will apply for any property owners that live within 5 road miles of a WPFD fire station.
- Class 10– For property owners that live greater than 5 road miles of a WPFD fire station the ISO still assigns a fire protection class of 10.
WPFD encourages you to contact your insurance provider or the Insurance Services Office about how this rating impacts your insurance coverage and costs. A decrease (which is an improvement) can lead to a decrease in insurance premiums if your insurance company uses the ISO PPC in their rating formula.
To learn more about the ISO PPC program, visit their website at https://www.verisk.com/insurance/about/faq/the-public-protection-classification-ppc-program/
About the Insurance Services Office (ISO) and their Ratings
An ISO PPC Classification is a rating assigned by the Insurance Services Organization (ISO) to evaluate a fire department’s service capabilities based on its physical boundary areas. Many insurance companies utilize this rating in determining the cost of homeowner insurance policies. Not all insurance 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 department by investing in our Personnel (training), Apparatus (Vehicles), Tools, Fire Stations, and more to get the most credit for our vast capabilities to strive for improved classifications at our next evaluation period.
Some criteria used to evaluate a fire department’s fire suppression capabilities include whether the department is paid (active/standby) or volunteer (variable staff/on-call), manpower volume, apparatus (type and use apparatus), training, capabilities (services and skills), mutual aid (help from other stations/departments), water sources (wet hydrants-water system/ or dry hydrants/pond/water shuttle), 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, for example, local water systems can offer increased water supply or hydrant access, improved vehicles, administrative management, emergency planning/preparedness, and training are given credit to continually work toward the improvement of a department’s ISO Classification.
More info about ISO PPC 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 a 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.