Dallas has been wasting fire department resources

Dallas Fire-Rescue officials say they spend a lot of time gearing up and rushing to calls that have nothing to do with fires.

False alarms, people trapped in elevators and car accidents on city streets, in particular, drain resources and at a time when there is little to spare.

So we’re supportive of new department policies that scale back how our firefighters and paramedics respond to these calls, without sacrificing safety.

The biggest change the department is implementing has to do with those non-highway, low-speed car accidents that tie up intersections and wreak havoc on commuters, but often involve no serious injuries.

From now on, the department will no longer automatically send ambulances when dispatched to the nearly 20,000 such calls it receives each year. Instead it will send only fire engines, which always carry at least one trained paramedic and all the medical gear needed to treat any injuries.

Should an ambulance be necessary to transport anyone to the hospital, one can be readily dispatched and arrive within minutes, Emergency Medical Service Battalion Chief Scott Clumpner recently told the Dallas City Council’s public safety committee. But that usually doesn’t happen. Hospital transports from surface street car accidents account for just about 13% of all EMS transports each year, he said.

Other changes include scaling back how the department responds to the nearly 14,000 automatic fire alarm calls it receives annually. That’s roughly 38 each day. Yet, last year only 16 of them, not even close to 1%, were actually the result of structure fires, Clumpner said.

From now on, the department will send only an engine to those calls that occur between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., instead of both an engine and a ladder truck. And during the day, when the department normally dispatches only an engine to alarms, those units will operate under the less serious Code 1 level, without lights and sirens blaring.

The other cutback involves people stuck in elevators, which, if you’re one of those people, sure seems pretty serious. Public safety committee chair Cara Mendelsohn said she was grateful for her recent rescue from a stalled City Hall elevator.

That’s scary. But a battalion chief doesn’t need to show up for people who are trapped in elevators, something that often happens during storms when fires often break out and need a chief’s attention. Firefighters can handle those elevator situations just fine. “We have run out of battalion chiefs,” Clumpner said. “We’d rather they be at structure fires.”

So would we. We applaud the department’s careful data review and thoughtful consideration of how it could run more efficiently. It’s still running behind its performance goals of responding within 9 minutes for medical emergencies and 5 minutes 20 seconds for structure fires, for 90% of calls. As of this writing, they respond within their goal times just 83% and 87% of calls, respectively.

Building efficiency is smart. And we hope this will help the fire department operate better and at lower costs.