Newspaper investigates fire service in Delaware
Watch video of interviews with volunteers from Elsmere VFC
Interactive map showing how companies respond and how they spend money
Read article: “Volunteer firefighting not what it used to be”
Read article: “When every second counts”
Response times, company boundaries and how they spend money are all topics being looked at by reporter Mike Chalmers as he investigates the fire and EMS service in Delaware for The News Journal. Chalmers focuses on volunteer departments throughout the state.
The picture above is of a fire in Ocean View three years ago. It is used as an example of how some departments aren’t meeting response time standards on structure fires. The $6 million fire didn’t see the arrival of the first due fire company for 17-minutes:
The News Journal’s analysis of nearly 6,000 Delaware structure-fire calls in the National Fire Incident Reporting System, a database maintained by the U.S. Fire Administration, shows wide variations in the time it takes for a firetruck to respond to an emergency. The data show:
•Urban fire companies — most of them in densely populated northern New Castle County — meet the toughest NFPA standard of nine minutes only 80 percent of the time.
•Suburban companies met their 10-minute standard on an average of 77 percent of structure-fire calls.
•Rural companies, which cover most of Delaware south of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, are held to the loosest standard of 14 minutes. They met that goal on 93 percent of their structure-fire calls.
The paper couldn’t do a similar analysis on EMS calls because, “The state Office of Emergency Medical Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Social Services, denied The News Journal’s request for a database of EMS response times and has refused to provide a breakdown of response compliance sorted by individual ambulance company”.
The report looks at how volunteer companies set response rules. In many areas the responding fire or EMS unit may not be the closest to the emergency. That’s because an address is within a company’s boundaries.
The paper reports an EMS call last summer in Sussex County prompted some modification to that policy. The graphic below explains what happened.
