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Firefighters with Orange County’s largest fire department aren’t meeting best practice goals for how fast they respond to 9-1-1 calls, according to a new report, which found their response time has only decreased by around one second from 2018 to 2023.
The OC Fire Authority offers fire and ambulance services to 23 of the county’s 34 cities, making them the first responders for nearly two million people.
Right now, around 90% of the 9-1-1 calls they receive get an emergency responder to the scene within eight minutes and 44 seconds.
In 2018, it was eight minutes and 45 seconds.
That result falls short of best practices, according to Citygate Associates, a contractor who reviewed the agency’s response times for OCFA.
Citygate analysts say first responders should be getting out within eight minutes and 30 seconds.
They also highlighted where a lot of the drag comes from – firefighters taking too long to get out of the firehouse.
“At slightly more than 3:30 minute over the five-year period, 90th percentile crew turnout performance is 75% slower than Citygates recommended 2:00 minute goal,” auditors wrote.
They also noted that the fire authority’s response time to get multiple units out to major events or first alarm fires was over seven minutes behind what it should be.
OC Fire Authority’s board of directors meets tomorrow to discuss the report at their headquarters in Irvine at 6 p.m.
The only area auditors found that OCFA was not lagging behind their goals was in the 9-1-1 dispatch center, which was 20 seconds ahead of the recommended response time.
Read: Orange County’s 911 Dispatchers Are Chronically Overworked; Can They Handle the Next Disaster?
OC Fire Authority staff did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
To fix the problem, auditors recommended new training for firefighters and establishing an official goal for them to work toward.
“The Board of Directors should adopt updated, clearly measurable response time goals for OCFA based on best practices, with the start time to be the 9-1-1 call receipt in fire dispatch and provide accountability for OCFA personnel to meet those standards,” auditors wrote.
Is There a Faster Way to Dispatch?
The report also highlighted how fires represent almost none of the fire authority’s response, with building fires making up less than 2,500 calls.
Meanwhile, emergency medical service made up nearly 75% of the authority’s calls according to the report.
Despite that, fire trucks are regularly dispatched to medical emergencies, a practice the authority has faced repeated questions over for years, including from a county grand jury in 2022.
[Read: Orange County Grand Jury Questions Sending Firetrucks to Medical Calls]
“Sending a 36,000 to 60,000-pound fire engine or aerial ladder truck down residential streets for strictly medical calls is not only dangerous and costly, but it also results in unnecessary wear and tear on our streets,” grand jurors wrote.
OCFA disagreed with the grand jury, sending a letter back arguing that they would dispatch the “closest and most appropriate,” resources they have.
“Industry best practice is to respond as rapidly as possible, delivering two trained and ALS certified paramedics to the side of a patient(s), with additional trained and BLS-certified EMT’s and ALS/BLS equipment to appropriately manage patient acuity level,” OCFA staff wrote in a letter signed by Chief Brian Fennessy.
But the Placentia Fire Department is taking a different approach to dispatch – one that’s helped shave multiple minutes off response times ever since the city voted to leave the fire authority in 2019.
[Read: Placentia First OC City to Leave Fire Authority and Form its Own Fire Department]
Rather than dispatching fire trucks and ambulances, they instead use a system that allows just an ambulance to the scene to handle medical emergencies, which make up most of the calls.
The Placentia and OCFA reports use different metrics to gauge success.
Placenta officials just rely on the average response time for both emergency medical service and firefighting calls.
From 2021-2023, Placenta’s average response time to a fire call was six minutes and 21 seconds according to the fire department’s biennial report.
Responses for EMS were even faster, with an average response time of four minutes and 48 seconds according to the same report.
While the OCFA report does not include the average response time or differentiate between fire and EMS calls, charts within the report highlight that most common response times fall between the five and seven minute mark.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the Fire Authority’s response times increased. The response time decreased by 1 second.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
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