Thursday, May 23, 2013

Firefighters Union: Bloomberg Funks With Emergency Response Time Data

From the Daily News:

The city is playing with fire as 911 call centers go dangerously understaffed and the FDNY underreports its emergency response times, union officials claimed Wednesday.

The FDNY is fudging its emergency response times by as much as a minute by not including how long it takes a caller to get through the understaffed 911 system, said firefighter union head Steve Cassidy.

“They’re not counting the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator. The time is significant — over a minute,” said Cassidy, citing FDNY response time data from the last two weeks analyzed by his union.
“When the (FDNY) says response times are four minutes for structural fires, the reality is they’re five minutes, if not longer. When they talk about medical emergencies that are 5 1/2 minutes, the reality is they’re closer to seven,” Cassidy said. 
He blasted the department for not releasing info to the public that tracks emergency response calls from the moment a 911 call is answered by an operator. Historically, the stats are based on when a fire truck or ambulance is dispatched on a call.



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fewer people died in fires in New York City in 2012 than in any year since modern record keeping began nearly a century ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Wednesday.
 
There were 58 fire-related deaths last year, compared to 66 in 2011, according to the city's data, which extends back to 1916.

Bloomberg said the shrinking figures marked a continual decline in fire-related deaths in recent decades. There was an average of 140 fire-related deaths a year in the 1990s, and 278 in the 1970s, according to the city.

"With (a) record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said in a statement.

Last week, he announced that there were fewer homicides in the city -- 414 in 2012 -- than at any point since modern crime records began in 1963.

The fire department's ambulance service also broke a new record for response times, Bloomberg said. The average response time to life-threatening medical emergencies was 6:30 minutes in 2012, shaving off a second from the previous record set in 2011, he said.


Of course if you add the the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator, then the response times are not historic in the least.

Is Bloomberg unaware of the funkiness in the city' reporting of the data?

Is he aware of it but doesn't care?

It's one or the other and either way, it's a big problem.

Looks like we need a Truth Commission for the FDNY data, along with the NYPD crime data and the NYCDOE test scores and graduation rates.

2 comments:

  1. Bloomberg is not only aware he has created this delay in emergency response time in one very important way. The city for years had employed trained fire dispatchers who took calls related to fire and ems emergencies. One of their locations was at the corner of Washington and Sullivan Place in Brooklyn. I know as my father in law was one of the dispatchers. Bloomberg decided to replace their profession with 911 and 311 dispatch personnel. The replacements lack the training and experience of the few hundred fire dispatchers. The Fire dispatchers were never a part of the Uniform Fire Fighters union and had no means to ward off the mayors agenda. Of importance Bloomberg did away with a small but very important union and since his cost saving effort has cost the city during emergencies. Most notably the lack of experience in handling fire and ems emergencies like during the Bloomberg Blizzard disaster.

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    1. Thanks for this information. I will use this for a future post.

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