By Doug Nelson, State Fire Marshal
We are greeting you this month from a new main office location. Due to space constraints and growing needs across the Insurance Department on the fifth floor of the Capitol, it was time to explore additional space for our main office staff, Marcy and me. Thanks to the North Dakota Firefighter’s Association (NDFA), we’ve found a great home in their new building. We appreciate this partnership and look forward to working alongside them. Our new physical location is 2792 East Broadway Avenue in Bismarck, but for now, our mailing address will remain at the Insurance Department.
Our office was fortunate to send three staff members to the National Association of State Fire Marshals Annual Symposium in Biloxi, Mississippi: Community Risk Reduction Leader Marcy Ost, Senior Deputy Fire Marshal Jess Sinerius, and myself. We participated in meetings, round-table discussions and listened to presentations from leaders from all around the country. The theme, “All hours, all hazards: Disaster never sleeps,” framed sessions on North Carolina’s hurricane response to Helene, a wildfire panel on the wildland-urban interface challenges, and the International Code Council’s Disaster Mitigation programs. The clear take-away: no single organization can respond to every disaster—a team approach must be applied in order to succeed.
In late August the Emergency Response Services Interim Committee held its first hearing last session’s fire studies. I testified about the current number of fire departments and firefighters in the state and shared an idea of a framework of the study, centered around how different state agencies can work together more effectively to help fire departments with large disasters. To be clear, this framework was presented as an idea for a starting point, and further input, collaboration, and consensus is necessary to determine how we can respond better together for the fire service in North Dakota. The committee tentatively plans to meet again in late October, and we’ll post details on our website calendar as soon as it is scheduled.
This month’s fire safety focus is appliance fires. I am sure our other contributors will cover some of the safety aspects of appliance fires, but I wanted to take a moment to share some of our fire investigation technology with you. Our office has been using a portable X-ray imager to document electrical and appliance fires. Sometimes appliances or small electrical items are difficult to fully examine without breaking them open. As part of the fire investigator’s job, we have to be careful with these items to ensure we do not cause damage in the examination process. The X-ray imager allows us to see metal components inside of the appliance without breaking it or disturbing it.
This has been a valuable tool, and we have used it to help determine whether there is damage inside an appliance. Sometimes this has been a critical piece of data that leads us to a final conclusion on the cause of the fire. If you have a need for fire investigation, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we can show you how this and some of our other tools help us to determine the cause.