New York City-based fire extinguisher sales and inspection businesses, such as Brooklyn's Ace Fire Extinguisher, have been speaking out on how the city is fighting fires with data, citing analytics that help FDNY firefighters track potential "hot spots." The New York City Fire Department has been using the Risk-Based Inspection System (RBIS), an Oracle-oriented program with data-mining capabilities, to better anticipate where fires may actually spark, with the centerpiece of the tool being FireCast, an algorithm that organizes data from the five city agencies into approximately 60 risk factors - which are then used to create lists of buildings, including NYC businesses, most vulnerable to fire.

"Complex, analytics-driven programs have created a whirlwind of 'smart' technologies to help modernize manual tasks and make jobs more efficient, and this is now helping firefighters in New York City get a jump on battling blazes, too," states Jack Shammah, owner of Ace Fire Extinguisher. "We have been supporting these efforts, notably alerting our business owner clients in the city, acknowledging that RBIS provides an inspection data warehouse the entire FDNY can access.

"Instead of being broken up among the city's 49 fire companies, any unit can now look up the latest information about when buildings and structures were last inspected."

Companies like Ace have been regularly studying the RBIS protocol, coming to learn that it excels at coordinating inspection activities for the FDNY's operational units. With each unit performing 26 different inspection types for the approximately 350,000 buildings in the city, the process is now highly streamlined, given that multiple tasks were all originally tracked on clipboards.

"One can imagine how cumbersome that can become and how difficult it is to manage," adds Shammah. "This system digitally coordinates all of that and understands various business rules; as a result, we have a system that automates the FDNY's entire inspection workflow, collecting statistics from the inspections and helping management supervise inspections while meeting internal goals."

Though RBIS and FireCast are proprietary in nature, the FDNY has presented its system to fire departments nationwide.

Ace Fire Extinguisher is located at 666 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222 and can be reached by calling (718) 608-6428. For more information visit https://acefireextinguishers.com/.

ACE Fire Extinguishers

666 Morgan Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11222

(718) 608-6428

Monday - Friday

Open 8am • Closes 8pm

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