Firehouse Mag.

[Captain 12]

On your run survays, they are off the wall. I know you can only Publish what you get back from the FD's But I have NEVER seen any in my 20 yrs of fire service. A request from Firehouse Mag. on my department calls. where do you get this info from.

And some dept's brag about we are the busy's truck or station whatever in the USA. and if you look at total calls there right, but in some case's like Miami area of Florida 99% of the calls are med or just bs calls that they never leave the station for. compared to North East where the Engine or Ladder only go to real fires that call last for hours or days but that's just one Call.

This is a mattter of Quantity vs Quality

I live in So. Florida I Know this is bedrock and nothing burns like up north. but don't discredit there number of calls,
Down south they have to justify there Income. so we get call out for everything like ( boy gets fish hook in finger) A med. unit is over kill, somebody might be full arrest. But an Ladder or Engine Company is total uncalled for, But thats a call for your run list.

Where do we draw the line.....

[gfdtrk4]

I agree captain 12,
MOST of the numbers published are B.S.
I would like to see the survey broken down, with seprate listing for ambulance assist and FIRES.
One year, the busiest heavy rescue in the survey was from the midwest, so I went to check them out...The rescue goes on E.M.S runs!!! Most dept.'s only send Eng.'s to amb. asst. .....sometimes a Truck co. will be sent to a/a's....(not often)! The heavy rescue co.??? when you only have one?? for a city of 100,000 or 300,000 residents?????
I (personally) don't care if you make 20 runs a day, every single day.... but have a working fire once a month (or less??)!?!!

[firemangeorge]

The Companies in the northeast are not that much different from anybody else. Its all in how you report your calls. For instance:
FDNY: Busiest Companies
Year: 2000

Company.......Runs..EMS...Work ers..OSW[/u]
Engine.E-75...5058..1406..3788.....519
Ladder.L-4....4209....63..3363.....356
Rescue.R-1....3016........1412.....412
Squad..S-41...3756........2435.....463

Runs are the number of times the company turned out; Workers are the number of alarms at which the company operated; OSW stands for Occupied Structural Worker and is a worker in an occupied building; EMS are the number of medical (CFR-D) runs.

As you can see, even the busiest Dept in the nation uses statistics that can be confusing or even misleading.

What constitutes an emergency, whether fire or EMS, is in the eyes of the caller, not the responder. When a situation escalates beyond the control of the people at the scene, the 911 system gets activated. Then someone responds and takes a run for it. Every city or town sends a different response level. Some send 4 engines and two trucks on every fire call. We used to send 2 engines and 2 trucks on every alarm drop, then we changed our response to automatic fire alarms to 1 and 1, and our downtown companies suffered reduced call volumes. A few years ago our chiefs were no longer allowed to ask for additional single companies (which is silly), now if they need another company, they have to ask for an additional alarm. We also send an engine as the first responder, then the crew determines what level of transport unit responds. In obvious cases, SOB, chest pain, a medic unit goes also. Ambulance 12 here in Cincy made over 5000 runs in 1997, and over eighty percent of those were transports!

Anyway, whether you go out five times after midnight for B.S. EMS runs or once for a good structure fire, you're still tired in the morning and you feel like you worked all night. For vollies, it has to really be hard, getting up, get your car, go to the station, go on the run, go back to the station, go home. Thats got to take a half hour for a non transport run at the minimum.

If you have to get on the rig and go, you made a run. Some are better than others, but they are all runs. I don't think most departments pad the books.

[ 10-31-2001: Message edited by: fireman george ]