City of Morgan Hill Public Safety Master Plan

information begins to be transmitted via voice and/or electronic means to the emergency response facility or emergency response units or personnel in the field. ■ Turnout time is the time interval that begins when the notification process to emergency response facilities and emergency response personnel and units begins by an audible alarm and/or visual announcement and ends at the beginning point of travel time. The fire department has the greatest control over these first two segments of the total response time. ■ Travel time is the time interval that initiates when the emergency response unit is actually moving in response to the incident and ends when the unit arrives at the scene. ■ Response time , also known as total response time , is the time interval that begins when the call is received by the primary dispatch center and ends when the dispatched unit arrives on the scene of the incident to initiate action. For this study, and unless otherwise indicated, response times and travel times measure the first arriving unit only. The primary focus of this section is the dispatch and response time of the first arriving units for calls responded with lights and sirens. According to NFPA 1710, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Departments, 2014 Edition , the alarm processing time or dispatch time should be less than or equal to 64 seconds 90 percent of the time for fire calls and 90 seconds (90 percent of the time) for EMS calls, when emergency medical dispatching is done. This section focuses on dispatch and response time analysis for the first arriving CAL FIRE unit. We typically focus on emergency calls where the department would respond with lights and sirens— also known as a hot response . CAL FIRE does not record the priority of a call in its records management system, so all eligible calls were included in this analysis. CPSM used 4,050 calls in creating this analysis. Of those, 2,558 calls were in MHFD’s coverage area and 1,492 were in SSCCFD’s coverage area. We excluded mutual aid calls and calls in which units were cancelled en route. Also excluded were any administrative calls, or calls in which the data were incomplete or inaccurate. We included first arriving units with complete unit dispatch time, unit en route time, and unit on-scene arrival times. For the CAL FIRE calls analyzed the average dispatch time was 0.5 minutes in the Morgan Hill service area and 0.9 minutes in the SSCCFD service area. These times include only the processing time involving the CAL FIRE Dispatch Center and does not include the call handling and call screening times at the Santa Clara 911 Center. The average turnout time was 1.7 minutes in the City and 2.1 minutes in the District. It must be noted that at several of the CAL FIRE station sites, the living areas and apparatus bays are apart and this is likely to impact the observed turn-out times. The average travel time showed the greatest difference between the City and District. It was 3.8 minutes in the City and 6.4 minutes in the District. Overall, the average total response time in the City was 6.0 minutes, and in the District it was 9.3 minutes. There was a slight variation between EMS and fire calls and this can be attributed to the need to don fire protection garments and breathing apparatus on fire calls and this added step often extends turnout times when compared to EMS calls. CAL FIRE RESPONSE TIMES

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