Hit 500 calls in one fire season and it changed how I view response times

Last summer we logged exactly 502 emergency calls in our district between June and September. I've been a firefighter for 12 years and that number blew past our average by almost 200. What got me was how many of those calls were for things like medical alerts and lift assists, not fires. It made me wonder if our local dispatch center is even tracking the right metrics for how fast we need to get to people. Has anyone else seen a big jump in non-fire calls in their area?

3 comments

3 Comments

carter.joseph1mo ago

@james_bell that report lines up with what we saw. It was around 70% for us too. 400 out of 502 calls were medical or lift assists. The thing that gets me is dispatch still treats every call like a fire response when most of them just need a couple medics and a basic truck. @troy_price is right though, you can't just cut the fire side down because the calls that matter need the full crew ready to go. But it does make you wonder if we're burning out engines and guys on non-fire calls when a smaller vehicle could handle a lot of it. The metrics they track are still stuck in the old mindset.

james_bell1mo ago

Saw a report that said medical calls make up 70% of fire department responses now.

troy_price1mo ago

The Charlotte fire department did a study last year that showed about 60% of their calls were medical, not 70%. But think about it @james_bell, that still means 30-40% of their time is on fires, car accidents, hazmat stuff, and all the other things they train for. If you strip away the medical side, you'd still need a ton of firefighters ready to roll on fires, which means you're not really saving money or resources anyway.