Montgomery County firefighters aim to arrive on the scene of a fire in six minutes or less — but they only do that about half of the time, according to newly released data. In urban areas, which generally have the fastest response times, the first engine arrived within six minutes for 55 percent of the 607 calls in the last fiscal year, the data show. For suburban and rural areas, that percentage dropped to 33 and 29 percent of 131 an 21 calls, respectively.
That means that for about 376 calls, the county’s Fire and Rescue Service took longer than six minutes to respond in fiscal 2011.
| Putting out fires | ||||||||||||||
| Montgomery County responses under six minutes for structural fires: | ||||||||||||||
| Fiscal 08 | Fiscal 09 | Fiscal 10 | Fiscal 11 | Fiscal 12* | Fiscal 13* | Fiscal 14* | ||||||||
| Urban | 25% | 43% | 48% | 55% | 56% | 57% | 58% | |||||||
| Suburban | 11% | 26% | 27% | 33% | 34% | 36% | 38% | |||||||
| Rural | 0% | 4% | 9% | 29% | 20% | 21% | 22% | |||||||
| Source: Montgomery County CountyStat | ||||||||||||||
| *Projected | ||||||||||||||
But Montgomery is not the only district in the area failing to meet its goal time more than half of the time. In the first half of 2010, Fairfax County reached 41 percent of its calls for structural fires within five minutes, while Montgomery firefighters reached about 44 percent of structural fire calls within six minutes in fiscal 2010.
Montgomery also performed better than Prince George’s County, which met the six-minute goal only 23 percent of the time in fiscal 2011. However, Prince George’s starts the clock the minute a call comes in, rather than the minute a team is dispatched.
By contrast, D.C. firefighters arrived on the scene of a structural fire within six minutes 98.9 percent of the time in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data are available.
Though there is no national regulation that fire departments are required to adhere to, a “voluntary consensus standard” set by the National Fire Protection Association requires the first engine to arrive on the scene of a fire within four minutes and the full engine deployment to arrive on the scene within eight minutes, according to Ken Holland, a fire service specialist with the NFPA.
The NFPA’s guidelines are intended for an urban environment on a grid, which Montgomery — unlike the District — is not, said Montgomery County Fire Chief Richard Bowers. Montgomery firefighters often have to travel vast distances to reach a fire.
He also pointed to events like the blizzards of 2010 that can skew data and bring down averages.
The data released by CountyStat, the county’s data analysis arm, project that response times will improve this fiscal year and in the next two years, but not by much. Urban response times are expected to reach 58 percent under six minutes by fiscal 2014, while suburban and rural times are predicted to reach 38 and 22 percent.
Without more staff, equipment and stations, those times won’t improve drastically, Bowers said.
“We’re under some severe economic challenges,” he said. “We are providing a service that is comparable to the population that we currently have.”
