Emerging standards are requiring fire departments to relate performance to population density. The theory is that you cannot expect to provide the same level of fire department services in a rural area as in a metropolitan center. The following descriptions are frequently used to define population density:
Metropolitan
Urban
Suburban
Rural
Wilderness
Your fire department may not have any metropolitan or wilderness areas but you can divide your jurisdiction into the three remaining protection levels as desired. Here's how it's done.
Press the "Setup Levels" button. Protection level check boxes will appear. Click on the check boxes that apply in your community.
Under each check box enter the minimum number of apparatus operations in the D3 district to qualify it for inclusion in that protection level. In the example above 2,000 apparatus operations or more are required to classify the D3 district as a Metropolitan area.
Do not get hung-up on the number. It's all relative. The only purpose of this numbering is to roughly sort-out protection level assignments by activity. After the rough sorting it's up to you to "drag and drop" the D3 district into the correct protection level. You have total control of the process.
When all D3 districts have been dragged-into a protection level press the "Create Map" button to see a map of D3 Districts by Protection Level. If the map looks OK press the "Update Records" button. This button will assign a Protection Level to all Incidents and Apparatus records allowing you to analyze performance by protection level.