Yearly Emergency Responses
How Many Incidents Does Pleasant Hill Goshen Fire & Rescue Respond To?
We responded to 1153 calls for service in 2022. That’s a little bit more than three calls per 24-hour period. Another way of thinking about that is to say that we responded to a 911 call a little bit more frequently than once every 8 hours. Those 1153 calls all take varying amounts of time. Sometimes we are dispatched and very quickly told by dispatch that we no longer need to respond, such as a fire alarm activation that is quickly reported as false by the building occupants. Other alarms can take hours, such as a structure fire or serious motor vehicle crash. On average, a call takes between 45 minutes to an hour from the time we are dispatched to when our crew is back available at the station.
It is important to note that for larger emergencies such as most active fires, vehicle crashes, and cardiac arrest (CPR), a single crew of 3-4 firefighter in one fire engine is not sufficient. For these types of calls, the NFPA 1720 standard is a minimum of 6 firefighters (which means two crews), and for more complex scenes, third and fourth crews are often needed. In those cases, with our staffing, a response needs to come from other area departments.
In addition to these challenges, Pleasant Hill Goshen Fire & Rescue experiences what are referred to as “overlapping calls”. This happens when there are two emergencies or more happening at the same time, or overlapping. Often, this means a second crew would need to respond to the secondary emergency, as a crew remains committed to the first. In the event of a medical emergency, it would be illegal for our crews to leave a patient they have begun to treat until the patient refuses care, or a higher level of care is present (The ambulance.)
On average, our organization experiences an overlapping call every 4 days in our community. This means 1-2 times per week we can expect to need to be in two places at once. Hopefully, we are able to staff a second resource to respond. When that is not the case, a crew would need to respond from a further fire station (like Dexter or South Lane), or the call would be delayed until we could get to the scene.
This chart reflects the types of calls our organization responded to in 2022. As you review this data, the totals listed for ‘Fire Authority’ represent all alarms responded to for the organization operating as one entity. Data is also shown by the original districts and mutual aid to demonstrate where our calls occur. Alarms are broken into categories by the nature of the incident found upon arrival by the responding personnel. All incidents dispatched to our organization are reflected in this data.
