Report: Some homes lack fire protection

Thousands of residents in Spokane’s farthest south and southwest corners are considered for insurance purposes to be “unprotected” from fire dangers because they are more than 10 minutes from the nearest fire station.

That’s the conclusion of a consultant’s report comparing the Spokane Fire Department to National Fire Protection Association standards released earlier this week.

In the Latah Valley area, there are 7,000 to 10,000 unprotected residents, according to the report. But the candidates vying for the job of Spokane mayor have been divided on whether building a fire station in that area is reasonable or necessary.

Spokane fire officials hired Emergency Services Consulting Inc. earlier this year to look at the agency’s operations. The report, called “Standard of Coverage and Deployment Plan,” looked at response times from a variety of angles including dispatching, how long it takes firefighters to leave a station, travel times, how the fire trucks are staffed and how far stations are located from households.

“If money was no object, regardless of what was going on in the city, we would always have equal fire protection for everyone,” said Spokane Assistant Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer.

“The Standard of Coverage is an industry standard for determining deployment effectiveness. The (report’s) science takes away politics, takes away opinion, and eliminates speculation,” Schaeffer said.

Joe Parrott, a consultant with Emergency Services Consulting and a deputy chief with the Salem Fire Department in Oregon, wrote the report. He said in general, the Spokane Fire Department is a solid organization but needs “to make a few operational changes.”

The concerns raised in the report, which reviewed Fire Department statistics from 2006, include the time it takes firefighters to get out the door after receiving a call; the inability to remotely change traffic lights, increasing travel times; too few paramedics spread out among fire stations; not enough manpower available during peak call times; and areas of town too far away from fire services, which included the south and southwest areas, as well as some northwest parts of the city.

The “turnout time,” which is the number of seconds between when dispatchers notify personnel of an emergency and when the crew begins to travel, needs to be improved, Parrott wrote. The national standard is 60 seconds or less. The Spokane Fire Department’s time was two minutes and 14 seconds, 90 percent of the time.

Schaeffer said the department’s “employees weren’t aware of the time required or expected by national standards,” In addition, there’s “the human factor – not pressing the button that tells dispatch they are on the way; also the layout of some fire stations, which puts firefighters’ living quarters in an area furthest away from the fire trucks and equipment,” he said.

Once fire crews are out the door, national response time standards were not met nearly 18 percent of the time.

The most likely reason for the delays was that crews were not in their primary coverage area because of training, administrative reasons or assisting on other calls.

The department’s busiest times are between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. each day, mostly in the downtown core and surrounding area. When personnel in the downtown stations are busy, others assist, which takes them out of their direct service area and increases response times.

If the Spokane City Council approves the hiring of six additional firefighters, Schaeffer said he hopes to add the personnel to the stations with the highest volumes of calls – stations 1, 3 and 4 – during peak hours, essentially adding two more engines to respond to calls.

A plan to install equipment for changing traffic lights is under way. In conjunction with Spokane County Fire District No. 9, city traffic engineers have begun installing the equipment. Combined, the two fire agencies have the approximately $100,000 it will take to purchase about 20 devices.

Andy Schenk, signal operations engineer with Spokane’s streets department, said the plan is to have the equipment installed at 20 intersections – from Francis Avenue and to the north – within the next two years.

Response times are crucial in saving lives, officials said. “An Oregon fire department studied the effect of time on cardiac arrest resuscitation and found that nearly all of their saves were within 1 1/2 miles of a fire station, underscoring the importance of a quick response,” Parrott wrote.

Most Spokane residents meet the national standard of living within four minutes of a fire station. Parrott also noted an uneven distribution of paramedics among the department’s 14 stations, which could be another contributor to slowed response times.

Fewer than half of the 17 trucks available to respond to calls are staffed by paramedics, and often there are two paramedics staffing one truck.

Fire officials would like to spread those paramedics out, but the item must first be negotiated with the firefighters union, Schaeffer said.

Firefighter response to blazes is also crucial, officials say. Within as little as three minutes, a home’s support beams can begin to fail, Parrott wrote. Safety standards require four firefighters on scene before two of them can enter a house, but many of the Spokane department’s engines are only staffed with three people. Therefore multiple fire crews must respond, sometimes from outside the area.

Due to budget cuts in 2004, in which more than 40 positions were lost at the Fire Department, fire officials said they cannot make an immediate change in how the trucks are staffed.

Said Parrott: “Based on meeting national standards, they are understaffed.”

When the consultant talked about coverage of geographic areas, specifically Eagle Ridge, parts of Qualchan and Moran Prairie, he said “the distances between this area and existing fire stations clearly is cause for concern.”

When lightning struck a house in Eagle Ridge on July 13, it took fire crews more than 10 minutes to reach the scene. The nearest station to that neighborhood is Station 4 on Riverside Avenue near downtown.

Rain helped douse some of the flames, and the home was saved.

Depending on the insurance carrier, the price tag for fire insurance in an “unprotected” area may be double that of residents who live in a protected fire area. Areas more than five road miles from a station are considered “unprotected” and classified as “10” for protection, based on a scale of 1 to 10, according to Washington Surveying and Rating Bureau, which oversees the state’s fire protection classifications.

A majority of Spokane is rated a class 3; the city was classified as 2 before the Fire Department’s layoffs in 2004, officials said.

Real estate agents are not required to reveal the level of fire protection when selling a home, according to the Spokane Association of Realtors.

William Jensen, an Allstate Insurance agent, said fire insurance for a home valued at $200,000 would cost $684 per year in an unprotected area compared with $368 in a class 3 area.

Al French, City Council member and mayoral candidate, said he voted to allocate money to buy land for a fire station to respond to incidents in the southwest part of town. “Eagle Ridge and Qualchan are areas designated for growth … and we need to plan for it,” he said.

According to a development plan, there will be 20,000 more residences in those areas by 2012, French said.

The threshold for building a new fire station is 7,500 to 10,000 residents or the time it takes to get to the area, French said of the city’s comprehensive plan regarding fire coverage.

“In the plan, the response time standard we set was 8 minutes,” French said.

Mayor Dennis Hession, who is running for election, said he agrees the area needs coverage, “but what we have to take into consideration is the resources you have to allocate to fire services and the best way to use those.

“We are responsible to all the residents.”