City of Calgary Fire Response times debate - Budget deliberations 2018

[ExtraSlow]

Anyone have thoughts on this? My understanding is that the current standard of 7-minute response times is based loosely on some international standard and it's supposed to reduce the chance of fire-related injuries (I think). Currently the fire department meets that 7-minute response standard for most calls in most areas of the city. Going to a 10-minute response time would mean fewer stations and less manpower required to cover new areas as the city grows, so there would be potentially substantial savings. Not sure if they want to go to this lower standard in existing nieghborhoods as well, but if they did I think they could eithr close some stations or reduce the manpower at some.

CBC new article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...oods-1.4582509

What does everyone think? Is this putting public safety at risk or is it a smart response to allocate scarce dollars?

[Brent.ff]

Seems to me to just be a lax reason to allow development to continue, while not wanting to put anymore money towards additional fire halls. Cart before the horse if ive ever seen it. Reminds me of Okotoks and limiting their development due to not having enough water, and then cancelling that by planning on buying water from Calgary in the future and still developing now before that connection is made.

[killramos]

See the only way this make sense is if they are ok taking the whole city to a 10 minute standard.

Is there some kind of objective measurement of the number of deaths switching to 10 minutes would lead to? Or damage costs?

2 tier system with 7 for existing and 10 for anything new is ridiculous.

[Swank]

That's a slippery slope, next it will be 12 minutes, then 15, etc.

[HiTempguy1]

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Is there some kind of objective measurement of...

Yea, one time long ago a kid probably died in a fire because the response took an extra two minutes. Now we've collectively paid an untold $millions over the past forever because of it

Objectively, a 7 minute response time is fucking nuts from any viewpoint of how quickly a unit can possibly get to an area.

I would 100% be down with 10 minutes across any city.

[Brent.ff]

And i would be happy to drop the time based on an actual determination that 7 minutes vs 10 minutes doesnt actually do anything, but using it just as a way to push faster and further development seems pretty shortsighted

[kenny]

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What does everyone think? Is this putting public safety at risk or is it a smart response to allocate scarce dollars?

I think maintaining the 7-minute target for new communities is a bit wasteful, or rather the way the City is trying to reach the target is wasteful. Take a look in the SE. They built a new fire station in the middle of nowhere back in 2012. Even today, the station sits in the middle of an empty field while the development is just starting to build up around it. The station probably should have been built either this year or next and the $ spent on operating it could have been spent elsewhere.

Either lower the target for new developments, or find a better solution than building a station in the middle of nowhere (use residential as temp fire station).

The whole debate however is not being framed right though, I read an article awhile back that had some interesting stats. Something crazy like less than 10% of fire department responses were fire related. So, really saying that lives are in danger because they aren't getting to calls within 7 minutes is a bit misleading. Perhaps we should focus on ambulance response times? :P

[Xtrema]

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The whole debate however is not being framed right though, I read an article awhile back that had some interesting stats. Something crazy like less than 10% of fire department responses were fire related. So, really saying that lives are in danger because they aren't getting to calls within 7 minutes is a bit misleading. Perhaps we should focus on ambulance response times? :P

Well reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Ambulance/EMS ain't equipped to cut you out of a wreck.

Apparently world standard is 6:24. Who knew.

7 is fine. Just make the developers pay for the services until they unload the last unit in the neighborhood and then the city can take over the cost or running it.

[HiTempguy1]

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That's a slippery slope, next it will be 12 minutes, then 15, etc.

Insurance covers the building. So the important part is rescuing people first (if there are any), and a close 2nd/possibly tied is making sure the fire doesnt spread. Slippery slope bs

[killramos]

Going to 10 minutes response time across the board seems reasonable enough as a way to balance costs.

But I don’t know how anyone could vote for some areas having better protection than others.

This is simcity 101.

[300havoc]

Honestly, if drivers would get out of the way of any emergency vehicle, I don't see why 7 minutes wouldn't be plenty of time. I'm within a radius of 3 Fire halls, 4 if I really stretch it, and I'm in the far SW. I'd vote that city expansion was slowed to let the infrastructure catch up, since Calgary has a garbage track record of actually planning ahead.

Sometimes people don't realize that if you live in a condo building there may actually be a third party company monitoring the fire alarms. This happened to my sister, it took 30 mins for Fire to reach the building. There was no emergency, but an alarm was going off and the monitoring company didn't see it/ignored it/whatever and didn't pass it along to Fire. Once Fire was actually called they were there within the 7 minutes. That was in a new community build in the deep SE.

[mr2mike]

Developers should be on hook for the building of the firehall and it's inital costs. They already get away with poor supporting road infrastructure that is left to the city to clean up.

Love how house spacing had decreased (developer benefits on this), chance of fire spreading increases due to this and they increase acceptable response times.

[dirtsniffer]

10 minutes sounds really close to 7 minutes until your in a situation where that makes a difference. It is also almost a 50% increase to response time. As mentioned above, it is likely based on ideal times as well.

[TurboMedic]

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The whole debate however is not being framed right though, I read an article awhile back that had some interesting stats. Something crazy like less than 10% of fire department responses were fire related. So, really saying that lives are in danger because they aren't getting to calls within 7 minutes is a bit misleading. Perhaps we should focus on ambulance response times? :P

I actually have the graphic right in front of me, published in CFD's own "magazine". Of 13,919 responses for the year, 233 were fires. That's 1.7% of their volume. The number of major structure fires that were in those 233 is probably easily googleable, as those would make the news, and I would hazard that's a small handful of those. They also track things like "severe weather", "public service assistance", "hazardous condition", which amount to nearly 19% of the volume. The biggest chunk, by far, is medical responses, which account for 58% of the volume. Medical responses are mostly cancelled. Vehicles are dispatched using MPDS card system, which has rigid questions with which they are directed down a flow to dispatching units and type of response. Those responses are "alpha" to "echo" in ascending priority. Anything "delta" and "echo" gets EMS and FD responding, and the qualifier for those are quite low. Really really low. For example, if someone says they feel "clammy", that triggers a delta vs. charlie. If someone has back pain and they get asked if they're breathing "normal", and say no because its hurts, that triggers delta, etc. Echo is strictly insufficient breathing (gasping, etc).

I can personally state that I cancel their response 95+% of the time, and that's not unique to me. They're responding for manpower purposes and they're not needed in those cases. They're handy in cardiac arrests though, and extrications. That said, on non delta/echos we can request their assistance for lifts, but the department is refusing to respond to these requests on a regular basis, leaving us to dispatch another ambulance.

If I recall correctly, this entire discussion started with the Greenwich development off of 16th avenue, and supporting the 10 minute response time window. I thought it was odd, as if they can't reach Greenwich in 10 minutes, then Greenwood Village right next to it has been outside the target response window forever, but that's just a trailerpark right? (that was sarcasm) Why is it an issue now?

I wish I could find the cost per response chart that was published by CoC indicating how much it cost taxpayers each time a FD vehicle was dispatched. In some of those locations it was $10,000+ just due to the lack of volume in the area.

I want to just say though, I'm not slagging the guys on the department, I like most of them. Its just frustrating that there's only so much pie to go around (ie: tax money), and its really really really needed in other areas more-so than the current state of the FD, but they still want a bigger piece

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Well reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Ambulance/EMS ain't equipped to cut you out of a wreck.

Apparently world standard is 6:24. Who knew.

7 is fine. Just make the developers pay for the services until they unload the last unit in the neighborhood and then the city can take over the cost or running it.

I've been working here in the city for 18 years, I can count on one hand, using 3 fingers the amount of people I've had to have cut from cars here. Its just not that common even in some pretty severe wrecks. When I worked rural? Sure, lots, and those response times were much longer than 10 minutes. But again, CFD (and you) should be focusing on the actual fact about distance from house in case of fire. Nothing else. If you are that worried about response times, there's many ways to reduce those, chute times and in-hall readiness are the most apparent to me. When a station goes lights out to sleep at 1030pm, and a call comes in at 1am, the response is markedly slower than during truck checks, or during lunch runs. Its all perception

[Disoblige]

lol, oh man. 7 minutes vs 10 minutes. I would be OK with 10, to be honest. Industry standard is to get your gear on in under 1 minute and I think most people can get it on under 45 seconds easily. So I'm guessing in a city, it would be already over a minute just to leave the hall. 6 minutes to reach destination, especially in terrible fucking traffic seems extremely difficult to do.

Where I'm at, we're a small rural community and the whole fire department are volunteer firefighters. Our response time varies and can be up to 45 minutes for highway accidents, and 20-30 minutes for camp/house fires.
Same for ice rescue; probably over an hour if it's at the lake

Unfortunately, that's the nature of things here and we go by the "golden hour" and "life over limb" approach.

[speedog]

Moot point now as council decided to stay with the 7 minute target.

[ExtraSlow]

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Moot point now as council decided to stay with the 7 minute target.

It'll come up again next year. And the year after that.

[rx7boi]

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lol, oh man. 7 minutes vs 10 minutes. I would be OK with 10, to be honest. Industry standard is to get your gear on in under 1 minute and I think most people can get it on under 45 seconds easily. So I'm guessing in a city, it would be already over a minute just to leave the hall. 6 minutes to reach destination, especially in terrible fucking traffic seems extremely difficult to do.

Where I'm at, we're a small rural community and the whole fire department are volunteer firefighters. Our response time varies and can be up to 45 minutes for highway accidents, and 20-30 minutes for camp/house fires.
Same for ice rescue; probably over an hour if it's at the lake

Unfortunately, that's the nature of things here and we go by the "golden hour" and "life over limb" approach.

I can't even get McDonalds drive-through and come home within 10 minutes and it's only several blocks away.

Maybe I need to drive faster

[CompletelyNumb]

I think we need to completely freeze suburb development for a few years. No new breaking ground. Build up the inner city.

There's no excuse for single story buildings within 1km of the core.

[ExtraSlow]

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I think we need to completely freeze suburb development for a few years. No new breaking ground. Build up the inner city.

There's no excuse for single story buildings within 1km of the core.

That will be quite the benefit to Airdrie, Okotoks, etc.