San Diego. Philadelphia. Los Angeles. Reno. Cincinnati. Facing demands for budget cuts from local officials, some of the nation’s largest fire departments have turned to a drastic cost-cutting move: brownouts.
Though the full impact of shutting down fire stations has yet to be determined, few in the fire service doubt it will lead to increases in response times. Already, browned-out stations are being connected to at least one death in San Diego and another in Philadelphia. In San Diego, a choking toddler died after the engine that would have responded to the call was sent elsewhere to fill in for a browned-out unit. San Diego Fire Department officials have acknowledged the brownout may have contributed to the boy’s death. And in Philadelphia, a row house fire killed a 12-year-old autistic boy. While members of the community and the firefighters union have pointed to brownouts as a contributing factor, the fire commission told local media the response time was about three minutes and that a lack of working smoke detectors and a possible delay in reporting the fire was to blame.
Geoff Cady, acting deputy director of the San Jose (Calif.) Fire Department, was facing a similar predicament. With the city facing a $116 million budget shortfall this year, city officials told the fire department to come up with $12 million in reductions out of its $155 million budget. With the city and the local firefighters union in a standoff over a new contract, brownouts seemed inevitable. “We did the math, and we realized we were going to have to make a reduction of four engine and one ladder truck company to meet that target,” Cady says. (In San Jose, an engine company includes four firefighters—a captain, engineer, firefighter and firefighter/paramedic—and carries pumps and water. A ladder truck company, which includes a 100-foot ladder that can put firefighters onto roofs and carries specialty rescue gear, has a second engineer, for a total of five firefighters on board.)
But the loss of five companies would mean problems on several fronts, not the least of which was that slower response times had the potential to make a bad budget situation worse. American Medical Response (AMR) has the exclusive operating rights to provide ambulance transport within Santa Clara County, including the city of San Jose. The San Jose Fire Department acts as a subcontractor to AMR to provide first response advanced life support. Contractually, the fire department has to get a paramedic on scene in eight minutes or less, 90 percent of the time, or incur financial penalties. “A five-company reduction would significantly hurt our ability to meet those requirements,” Cady says. “It’s one of the reasons we felt our strategy about deploying resources had to be more progressive and aggressive than what we have seen elsewhere around the country.”
So Cady began looking for ways to minimize the impact on response times. He started off by studying what other departments have done, including closing stations with the lowest call volume and instituting rolling brownouts, or rotating closures. “That spreads the pain politically by giving the sense that everybody is sharing equally,” Cady says. “But it’s not equal. One station may get one call a day; another may get 17 calls a day. We didn’t feel either of those strategies was the right concept for us.”
Instead, Cady took a cue from the private ambulance sector and came up with a plan he calls “dynamic deployment,” which includes moving apparatus and companies from station to station based on historical and projected need.
The plan incorporates aspects of system status management along with standards of cover, the fire service’s system for assessing resource deployment to determine if they have the right types of equipment and vehicles to respond to not just medical calls, but to fires, hazmat incidents and other situations as well. “What we came up with was a blend of system status management and standards of cover,” Cady says. “It’s dynamic, in that we are looking at demand as they would in system status management—when do calls occur, where do they occur?—as well as what areas of the city have a higher fire risk.”
Changes for the fire service
Not so long ago, firefighter deployment was relatively simple. Companies were assigned to a particular station, and they responded to calls in their geographic area. During major fires or other incidents, an engine company might “move up,” or get sent to another station to cover for the engine companies responding to the incident. In the past, dispatchers typically made those decisions based on instinct, Cady says.
That might have worked when resources were more plentiful. But fire departments today are under increasing strain to do more with less. A recent analysis showed San Jose was already stretched thin in regard to number of firefighters per capita and per mile covered compared to other cities, he says.
As the budget crisis grew, some city council members suggested going from four firefighters in each company to three. But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandates firefighters who enter a burning building do so in pairs and that two firefighters outside track them—the “two-in two-out law.”
While some smaller fire departments have three-person companies, they often abide by the OSHA rule by fighting fires only from the outside of buildings until another company arrives so they can enter buildings and still have two out, Cady says. But in San Jose, waiting to enter would have compromised the fire department’s ability to meet the standards of cover goals adopted by the city in 2000, which state that the fire department will confine fires to the room of origin 80 percent of the time.
Instead, they tried to see if they could deploy the remaining companies more efficiently. A few years ago, the city had purchased software made by San Diego-based Deccan International, known as LiveMUM, or Live Move-Up Model, which uses real-time and historical data to track firefighters and help dispatchers determine how to move resources around the city. The software can interact with the city’s CAD system in real time to determine when and where move-ups are necessary. The software had never been implemented; Cady convinced the city it was time to change that. LiveMUM is also being used in Austin-Travis County EMS and the Austin City Fire Department in Texas; Alameda County and City fire departments in California; Bexar County Fire Department in Texas; San Diego Fire-Rescue Department; Seattle Fire Department; Nashville Fire Department; and about 2 dozen other cities throughout the U.S. and Canada.
But making the most of LiveMUM costs money—about $500,000. Some of that went to upgrading on-board computers to enable better tracking of vehicles. Much of it went to hiring three additional senior dispatchers and assigning one battalion chief to monitor the system throughout much of the day.
Though LiveMUM sounds a lot like system status management, Cady emphasizes that dynamic deployment is more than that. Historical data can be useful, but firefighters had to think about fire potential. Certain areas were hotbeds of fire activity, including creekbeds with homeless encampments and higher-density, older housing without interior sprinklers, particularly in lower socioeconomic areas, Cady says.
They also had to consider the what-ifs. San Jose International Airport had never had a fire, so strictly speaking, it was their lowest-volume station. But a fire could be catastrophic, so pulling personnel from the airport was out of the question, Cady says. San Jose is also home to many high-rises. Again, while they typically have a low call volume, the fire department has to be ready for the worst. “Certain apparatus should be the last to move because of the type of risk, even if historically there aren’t a lot of calls there,” Cady says.
That’s where Cady turned to standards of cover, which considers the type of vehicle and number of personnel that are likely to be needed.
After doing their analysis, so far, San Jose Fire has closed one fire station and turned several two-company stations into one-company stations. Prior to dynamic deployment, there would typically be one or no move-ups a day. Now, five companies are being sent to other stations, but that could increase significantly on a busy day. “Through this crisis we are trying to identify strategies that can improve overall efficiency even if the folks in the fire stations don’t like it,” Cady says.
Before the brownouts, firefighters were meeting response time goals about 82 percent of the time. The first month of data is showing there has been no drop in meeting those goals, although they have had a lower-than-usual number of brush fires due to cooler weather so far this season.
Private ambulance experience
Cady knows the new system is unpopular among some firefighters. “Labor is not going to like it,” he says. “If we show we can somehow manage to reposition resources and hang on to response times, it means we can live with five fewer companies.”
The city is currently in difficult negotiations with the union over pay and benefits. Unions representing other city employees, including the police department, have already taken cuts in pay and benefits. Negotiations with the fire department are in arbitration.
One reason Cady is willing to shake up the fire department is because of his experience in private sector EMS. He began as an EMT in Merced, Calif., in 1975 and later became a paramedic in Fresno. During the 1980s, he worked for another private ambulance company contracted with the city of San Diego. After stints as research director for JEMS and working for Jeff Clawson, who developed the Medical Priority Dispatch System, Cady was hired by the Gilroy (Calif.) Fire Department as an EMS analyst. He later went to San Jose to work as an EMS consultant in 2004.
He acknowledges that dynamic deployment has potential drawbacks, including wear and tear on vehicles and increased fatigue, which can lead to more injuries and more mistakes. He plans to closely monitor workers’ comp claims and injuries to make sure this doesn’t happen. Firefighters have also brought up concerns about the risk of going into buildings they aren’t familiar with, he says, which he hopes to mitigate by making sure information about high-risk buildings (such as old warehouses, for example) that have been inspected by firefighters is readily available to all.
“We are trying to achieve a balance between move-ups and overall efficiency and safety,” he says.
It’s something that has to be done, Cady adds. “Being able to hang with your buddies in the fire house is a great way of life,” he says. “But when you look at it from the standpoint of tax dollars and efficiencies, it’s going to have to change. It’s what we have to do to provide the best possible service given the reduction in resources.”
