- Author
-
Oppenheimer, K. R.
|
Alger, R. S.
|
Martin, S. B.
|
McNamee, P. C.
|
Offensend, F. L.
- Title
- Cost Effectiveness of Marine Fire Protection Programs. Final Report.
- Coporate
- Stanford Research Inst., Menlo Park, CA
- Sponsor
- National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
-
NBS GCR 79-173,
November 1978,
233 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Keywords
-
cost benefit analysis
|
cost effectiveness
|
fire departments
|
fire losses
|
fire models
|
fire protection
|
marine transportation
|
merchant vessels
- Abstract
- This report presents the results of a cost-effectiveness study of alternative marine fire protection programs. It includes an estimate of current and future marine fire losses and a comparison of the cost-effectiveness of programs designed to reduce these losses. The study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce, evaluates proposed legislation that would establish regional marine firefighting teams in port cities throughout the country. In the analysis, a wide range of alternatives are compared with the regional team approach; these alternative approaches include fire prevention and fire suppression, and involve fire departments, the U.S. Coast Guard, merchant seamen, and fire protection equipment. To compare the cost-effectiveness of these marine fire protection programs several quantitative models are built-models of fire development, firefighting performance, and fire losses. These models compute the expected net savings of each alternative, where expected net savings is defined as the expected reduction in losses minus the expected cost of the program (relative to the status quo). The models relate firefighting performance in each type of ship fire to the extent of damage that occurs. They incorporate both historical data and consensus judgments of experts, and are tested and calibrated against past ship fire data. The alternatives are ranked by expected net savings and by incremental benefit-cost ratios. The optimal program turns out to be a combination of several of the individual alternatives.