City of Morgan Hill Public Safety Master Plan

Recommendation: CAL FIRE should build its training regimens and tactical strategies around the exterior or transitional attack when the fire scenario and the number of responding personnel warrant this approach. Table 4-1 aggregates the calls for the twelve-month period evaluated. EMS calls represent the largest percentage of calls for service at almost 60 percent; this predominance of EMS calls is not unusual and is quite similar to many communities CPSM has observed. While fire call types represent nearly 21.4 percent of the calls for service, actual fire calls (structural and outside) represent only 3.5 percent of the overall calls, with the majority of these being outside or wildland fires. Hazard, false alarms, good intent, and public service calls represent the largest percentage of the fire calls (83.6 percent), which is also typical in CPSM data and workload analyses of other fire departments. One interesting observation in this data set was the higher occurrence of actual fires in the District when compared to the City. Overall, two out of every three actual fires occurred in the District. In terms of structure fires, only five occurred in the City (18 percent), while 23 occurred in the District (82 percent). Though this comparison was limited, in that it only looked at the most recent yearly figures, it does indicate a higher fire incidence in the District than in the City. However, when comparing the total response activities, the City responses accounted for 65 percent of the call activity while the District responses accounted for only 35 percent of the overall activity.

TABLE 4-1: Call Types During Twelve-month Study Period

Number of Calls by Location

Calls per Day

Call Percentage

Call Type

MHFD

SSCCFD

Total Calls

EMS

2,037

824

2,861

7.8

52.0

MVA

166

299

465

1.3

8.4

EMS Total

2,203

1,123

3,326

9.1

60.4

False alarm

223

115

338

0.9

6.1

Good intent

38

69

107

0.3

2.0

Hazard

82

51

133

0.4

2.4

Outside fire

57

107

164

0.4

3.0

Public service

311

96

407

1.1

7.4

Structure fire

5

23

28

0.1

0.5

Fire Total

716

461

1,177

3.2

21.4

Automatic aid

9

249

258

0.7

4.7

Cancelled

138

96

304

0.8

5.5

NA

NA

Mutual aid

443

1.2

8.0

3,066

1,929

Total

5,508

15.1

100.0

Note: All mutual aid calls and 70 cancelled calls occurred outside of both MHFD’s and SSCCFD’s areas.

Observations:

Overall ■ The departments received an average of 15.1 calls per day, which includes 0.8 cancelled and 1.2 mutual aid calls.

■ On average, there were 0.7 automatic aid calls per day to which other agencies responded.

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