GILROY
– The Gilroy Fire Department is responding faster to emergency
calls in the southern and eastern parts of the city than in the
northern and western areas of Gilroy, according to new information
compiled by the GFD.
Striving to improve its response times to emergency calls
throughout the growing city, the GFD has begun compiling statistics
that break down its service to four designated areas of the city.
This is the first time the GFD has ever analyzed its response times
by service districts, and fire officials are already praising the
relevance of the data.
GILROY – The Gilroy Fire Department is responding faster to emergency calls in the southern and eastern parts of the city than in the northern and western areas of Gilroy, according to new information compiled by the GFD.
Striving to improve its response times to emergency calls throughout the growing city, the GFD has begun compiling statistics that break down its service to four designated areas of the city. This is the first time the GFD has ever analyzed its response times by service districts, and fire officials are already praising the relevance of the data.
“I’m elated we’re finally getting response numbers in different service areas of the city,” GFD Chief Jeff Clet said. “This is essential to helping us meet the future needs of the city by highlighting some of our strengths and weaknesses.”
Using a newly acquired software system made specifically for fire department record management, the GFD has divided the city into four “service areas” in which it analyzes its response times.
The areas are labeled “Chestnut,” which covers the southern and eastern part of the city currently served by the Chestnut Fire Station located on Chestnut Street near Tenth Street; “Las Animas,” which is the northern and central part of the city currently served by the Las Animas Fire Station on Wren Avenue; “Sunrise,” which is the northwestern part of the city that will be served when the city’s third fire station opens at 880 Sunrise Drive in July; and “Santa Teresa,” the area near Christmas Hill Park and the planned Glen Loma Ranch development which according to Gilroy’s Master Plan will eventually house the city’s fourth fire station.
“We broke up the city into the four service areas to give us a better sense of where we needed improvement,” said Geoff Cady, the GFD’s newly hired fire and emergency medical services analyst who is collecting the new data. “With the city continuing to grow and cover more area, we can use this data to plan for the future and ensure the new areas of the city receive adequate service.”
According to the data collected for the GFD’s 253 calls between Jan. 1 and Feb. 20, the GFD’s average response time to a call in the Chestnut area was three minutes and 56 seconds, four minutes and 28 seconds for the Las Animas area, five minutes and 30 seconds for the Sunrise district and five minutes and 35 seconds for the Santa Teresa area.
“But I want to emphasize that this data is very preliminary and only represents 14 percent of our annual call volume,” Cady said.
Those times represent the time it takes a fire engine to arrive at an emergency scene from the moment the fire station gets the call from dispatch at either of the city’s two current fire stations, but it does not include the time it takes for the 911 dispatch to confirm the call and address with the GFD, which is usually between 30 seconds and one minute, Cady said.
“We have a departmental goal to respond to 90 percent of our calls in five minutes or less,” said Cady, pointing out that the GFD is required by law to respond to 90 percent of its calls in eight minutes or less. “Studies show that with many emergency medical calls – especially cardiac cases – paramedic aid within the first five minutes dramatically increases the chance of full recovery by the victim. To make it simple, if we can get there in five minutes both our fire and medical abilities are greatly improved.”
So far, the GFD has been able to meet the five-minute goal designated by City Council 85 percent and 75 percent of the time in the service areas closest to the current fire stations, Chestnut and Las Animas, respectively. But in the farther reaches of the city designated as the Sunrise and Santa Teresa districts, the five-minute goal has been met less frequently – only 36 percent in the Sunrise area and 64 percent of the time in Santa Teresa.
“The number of stoplights, traffic and the speed of surface streets all have an effect on the times,” Cady said. “The good news is that once the Sunrise Station opens, the Northwest Quad will have much better coverage.”
Cady also said that mutual aid calls the GFD responds to at the request of county fire agencies have to be included in the data and often can skew some of the numbers and averages. For example, the Las Animas fire station recorded its maximum response time of 18 minutes and nine seconds to a call when it was responding to a South Santa Clara County Fire District emergency north of the city.
“We are trying to make our way to our target (of five minutes), but we can’t meet that goal 100 percent of the time,” Clet said. “The important thing now is that using this data we can see that overall we are doing a fairly good job, but there are areas where we need to improve. … Essentially, this data serves as a major resource to improve the service we bring to the city.”
