Fire Chief Edmund Cain stood in front of local government officials earlier this week and delivered the news that put a smile on their faces – Villages firefighters are arriving at emergency calls in an average time of 4.25 minutes.
It’s a number that many fire departments can only dream about. It’s also a number that gives paramedics more precious seconds to begin treatment on injured or sick patients. And it’s a number that Cain’s department has been able to maintain for many years despite the monstrous growth that’s going on right now in Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.
“Obviously, response time means everything, no matter what kind of situation we’re dealing with,” Cain said. “Our crews that take number quite seriously and they are constantly working on ways to improve it. It’s great now, but we want to make it even better and we’re working on that,” the chief said of his department, which currently has eight stations, 120 firefighters, 13 administrative staff and a much-envied cardiac save rate of 40 percent.
Cain said Villages firefighters also are beating the industry standard of 60 seconds during the daytime and 90 seconds at night for getting on the engine and leaving the station after receiving a call for service. He said Villages crews average 53 seconds across the board, which includes those nighttime calls when firefighters oftentimes are sleeping when calls for help come in.
“The turnout time is from the time the tones go off, and that’s done on a 24-hour basis,” Cain said. “So you can see the staff is really moving to get out to the trucks and get to the scene.”
Cain also showed members of the Amenity Authority Committee and the Village Center Community Development District board graphics that showed a breakdown of calls for this past January (2,624) and a 12-month period running from Feb. 1, 2018 through this past Jan. 31 (25,451). He noted that on both charts the overwhelming majority of calls handled by the department centered around emergency medical services – 53.77 percent in the month of January and 57.07 percent in the 12-month analysis.
“They’re our larger volume of incidents throughout the District,” Cain said.
Moving forward, Cain said, the department is tackling a couple of important projects. He said they are working to gain accreditation through the Center for Public Safety and Excellence – an effort that should be completed in August 2020.
That project includes many important factors, including a more detailed method to look at response times by measuring 90 percent of the call volume every month instead of an overall average. And it allows departments to set goals for their response times and then measure the true numbers against those goals on a monthly and yearly basis, thereby giving them valuable information that can be used to identify ways to make improvements if need be.
Cain said the other project involves the department’s rating from the Insurance Services Office (ISO), which can have an effect on how much residents pay in premiums. Cain said that rating is based on a number of factors, including the fire department’s operating procedures, response times and equipment, among other things.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Cain said The Villages Public Safety Department’s rating is a 2, down from a 4 in September 2015. And he said the ultimate goal is to achieve the highest level of 1.
“There are 45,000 fire departments in the United States and .01 percent have an ISO rating of 1,” Cain said. “There’s six of those in the State of Florida right now and we’re hoping to be the seventh.”
District Manager Richard Baier said he’s thrilled to have a fire department that boasts such an outstanding performance record across the board.
“I think people choose to live here for the quality of life,” he said. “And one of the big quality of life factors is certainly emergency response – fire and EMS. To have response rates like that that are hovering around four minutes is excellent. It’s a credit to the staff of the department and to the boards and committees that fund them.”
