Emergency medical response dominates firefighter workload
March 3, 2010
By J.B. Wogan
New: March 3, 1:49 p.m.
Sammamish firefighters spend a small fraction of their time fighting fires. That’s one overwhelming trend in a recent report from Eastside Fire & Rescue.
Over the last five years, 5.1 percent of calls to EFR firefighters involved a fire. In 2009, 4.5 percent of calls were fire related.
Most of EFR’s incidents in Sammamish — 60.6 percent in 2009, 62 percent in the last five years — were for emergency medical services. In the last five years, the city averaged about 1,073 emergency medical services incidents each year. Last year was slightly below that average at 1,068.
Wes Collins, deputy chief of planning at EFR, said emergency medical services incidents are everything from a cut finger to a heart attack, from falling down the stairs to twisting an ankle on the sidewalk.
The rest of the calls in 2009 included automatic fire alarms (12.2 percent), motor vehicle accidents (4 percent), rescue calls (0.1 percent) and 18.4 percent were classified as “other.”
Other is a catchall category that includes non-emergency incidents as false alarms, broken gas pipes, flooded basements and investigating suspicious substances that could be hazardous.
EFR is an interlocal fire protection agency that serves a 190-square-mile area, encompassing Sammamish, Issaquah, North Bend, Carnation, May Valley, Tiger Mountain, Wilderness Rim and Preston.
The EFR report shows that emergency medical services make up the bulk of incidents across the agency. In the last five years, emergency medical response calls constituted 66.4 percent of incidents in the agency’s urban areas and 55.3 percent in its rural areas.
The urban areas — Sammamish, Issaquah, North Bend and Carnation — tend to have a slightly lower percentage of incidents related to fires and motor vehicle accidents, but higher percentages for emergency medical services and automatic fire alarms.
Collins said urban areas tend to have higher emergency medical services incidents because cities have higher concentrations of senior citizens, who are more prone to injury.
Urban areas have more automatic fire alarm incidents because they have more commercial buildings with fire alarm systems in place, he said.
What partners in EFR pay does not correlate with incident counts.
Issaquah has the most incidents per year (averaging about 3,100), but is paying the third most out of the five partners (about $4.6 million in 2010). Sammamish has the third most incidents per year (averaging about 1,731), but pays the second most (about $5.3 million in 2010). King County Fire District 10 has the second most incidents per year (averaging about 1,733) but pays the most ($6.8 million in 2010).
The funding model for EFR is based on property values. The concept is that residents pay for fire protection and emergency medical response in case something does happen — regardless of whether it actually does.
Collins said the agency could have zero emergency medical services incidents in a given year, and it would barely show up in the annual budget.
“Whether the call is made, or not made, the cost is the same,” he explained.
The EFR’s incident count report also showed that firefighters respond to significantly more incidents on Fridays and Saturdays than on other days of the week.
The report also showed that the number of incidents more than doubled between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. and shrunk by about the same amount between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Reporter J.B. Wogan can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 247, or jbwogan@isspress.com.
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