Fire & Emergency Services

Fort Lee Fire and Emergency Services is an Internationally Accredited Agency.

Originally accredited in March 2004 by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CFAI), one of the commissioning bodies of the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE). Fort Lee was reaccredited in March 2009 for five additional years.

What is Accreditation?

Accreditation is a peer review based continual self improvement process that vets the laws, rules and regulations that apply to an organization against the actual policies, practices and performance of that organization. For all Department of Defense (DoD) Fire Service organizations participation in the CFAI Accreditation Process or another process that evaluates all of the same CFAI categories is mandated by DoD Instruction 6055.06.

The road to becoming an accredited agency is an arduous and rewarding one, requiring objective documentary proof to determine the compliance and credibility of the organization’s policies and practices. The peer assessment team that evaluates an organization’s accreditation documents reviews several hundred pages of description, appraisal and plans of an organization supported by over a thousand more individual reference documents. The accreditation process is not anymore technically complex than the organization itself is but the actual process requires a significant degree of organization and perseverance. The time table for a federal fire service organization to become an accredited agency if led by a well organized team and accreditation manager with the Fire Chief’s support can be expected to be completed between 18 months to 2 1/2 years.

Why become an accredited agency?

If you are a DoD Fire Service Organization it is a regulatory requirement (DoDI 6055.06 section 6.15.3) and it is also mandated by Public Law Title 15 United States Code Section 272, which requires that all Federal agencies and departments use technical standards that are developed or adopted by voluntary consensus bodies. However aside from these technical reasons in law and regulation to become an accredited agency it is simply worth the effort.

The dividends paid to a fire and emergency services organization pale in comparison to the efforts involved. If you as a fire leader have ever sat in front of the city manager, county administrator, city council or board of supervisors and tried to justify maintaining or expanding your budget or increasing staffing of your organization then you already know the difficult road that lies in wait for you. Subjective arguments that rely on the capability assessment of current assets and the risk analysis of the current jurisdiction protected (albeit based on years of experience) is in the end simply an opinion from a very experienced officer. Being able to provide objective proof in documentary form that is based on law, rule and regulation, existing organizational performance and certified by an outside panel of industry experts (it is common for other Fire Chiefs, senior fire leadership, and accreditation managers from other accredited agencies to make up the peer assessment team) will goes much farther than subjective argument.
Placing a black and white document, backed by reliable and proven evidence, and certified by a third party industry experts in front of a jurisdiction’s leadership clearly identifies the locality’s standard of response coverage including a detailed risk assessment, and the required staffing and funding needed to provide to fire and emergency services to their community.