I'm happy to. It's one of the things people need to understand about the fire service and how we tie into the economic infrastructure of society. One of the mistakes the fire service made a number of years ago was that we were always talking about fires as losses. When we have a major fire, we talk about the loss to the community in dollars. We realized that we should be talking about what proper fire protection actually saves a community, and this relates just as much to hazardous material training.
When you think about it, that proper first response for a hazardous material accident will allow the entire incident to be mitigated. If the first responding crews are making appropriate decisions on whether people need to be evacuated or the area needs to be cordoned off and diked, we are enabling the commercial and industrial community around there to function. It is not disrupted for a number of days because improper decisions were made.
Therefore, it's actually a commercial saving to the community if all these things are run properly, just as when you have the proper response to a fire in a community. A proper response, which can then put the fire out or mitigate the loss, actually results in a savings down the road, as there's less disruption. In a retail operation, for instance, you have people going back to work the next day because the fire was stopped and the adjacent stores are able to continue to operate.
We need to talk more about the value the fire service brings to the community, as opposed to just what the costs of these incidents are.