Effect of fire shelters on perceived fire danger: implications for risk compensation

Abstract

The fire shelter is an integral part of wildland firefighting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). There is growing concern, however, that firefighters may accept greater levels of risk while carrying them. Such concerns are consistent with Risk Homeostasis Theory, which postulates that behavior is regulated by an internal stabilizing process that balances target and perceived risk and the effects of safety interventions. When any one of the three components changes, the resulting disequilibrium is compensated for by changes in behavior. As a safety intervention, fire shelters may alter the equilibrium of this system producing a behavior change that negates any safety improvements it produced. Two experiments were conducted to assess how PPE affects the behavior of athletes and how fire shelters affect wildland firefighters’ perceptions of fire danger. In Experiment 1, 53% of participants demonstrated behavior that offset gains in safety produced by PPE. The results from Experiment 2 revealed that the presence of fire shelters significantly reduced perceived hazard levels associated with three different fire scenarios. Although neither experiment actually measured the behavior of firefighters, the combined results suggest that firefighters might not be immune to the effects of risk compensation.