BY MARK WALLACE
The proposal below is somewhat controversial, and there are a few very legitimate reasons for not supporting this strategy. Responding to emergency calls using red lights and sirens is an important fire service marketing tool. Many will offer reasons why this hypothesis is wrong, but consider the following basic truths:
- Far too many fire apparatus are involved in vehicle accidents.
- The fire apparatus driver must have the capabilities and the proper attitude to arrive at the correct location as quickly, efficiently, and safely as possible.
- The essential requirement is that the vehicle must arrive; any circumstance that prevents this is unacceptable.
- Since even the best and safest drivers can be involved in an accident, we must do everything reasonably possible to mitigate the effects of others’ actions that jeopardize our response.
- Personnel driving any fire department vehicles must drive just as safely when responding with red lights and sirens as they would in a nonemergency response.
- The response times to most emergencies are not much different when we are driving properly with red lights and sirens than when we are driving without red lights and sirens and obeying all traffic laws over the same route. However, red traffic signals at intersections do increase response time.
- Traffic preemption devices, which allow apparatus drivers approaching a signal-controlled intersection to change the traffic lights to green, reduce response time along a route that goes through such intersections.
- In our community, the average person receives direct emergency service from the fire department only about once in a lifetime, on average. Although some people are “frequent flyers”-i.e., they request emergency services often-many of them never have a real fire or a medical emergency.
- Many citizens see or hear our emergency response daily as we race across town with red lights flashing and sirens blaring as we respond to another citizen’s emergency.
PERCEPTION IS REALITY
For now, consider the viewpoint of the recipients of our services and those observing our actions. If those reporting/observing the situation think it’s an emergency, it really doesn’t matter to them if we disagree. They expect us to treat the situation as they perceive it, an emergency. My department’s basic philosophy is to “treat people the way they want to be treated.” So if a citizen thinks an incident is an emergency, we respond as if it were objectively an emergency.
The classic example: Mom calls 911 because her five-year-old fell off his new bike and skinned his knee. To little Johnny, it hurts, so he cries; to him, it is a tragedy because he is bleeding and it hurts. So he cries and calls for Mom to fix it. When Mom sees the blood, she decides whether this is a “real” emergency or not. If she decides that it is, she calls 911, and we then respond.
In any medical-dispatching priority system with which I am familiar, for a call involving a five-year-old with a bleeding knee, the dispatcher would send a couple of paramedics in an ambulance to confirm and resolve the situation. The outcome would not change if the ambulance crew responds nonemergency or with red lights and sirens.
Get the picture? It’s a skinned knee, not a life-threatening injury-hardly a time-sensitive incident. Little Johnny could probably walk to the doctor’s office or hospital, and the medical outcome would be the same.
The big difference is that this is Mom’s only five-year-old. He’s crying and bleeding; it is a critically important emergency incident-in her mind, at least. If we don’t treat her as she wants to be treated, she will be disappointed. Johnny’s badge of honor (the scar on his knee) reminds him that he survived the trials and tribulations of learning to ride a bike. However, the scar will remind his Mom that we didn’t act as if we cared in our response.
With this type of benchmark incident, if the ambulance responds with red lights and siren (and arrives at the correct address without involving itself or another vehicle in an accident), Mom will hear that the unit is en route as soon as the driver activates the siren, and she will know that help is on the way. She will perceive that we care about the well-being of her child enough to disturb the entire city with sirens blaring. The response time to the incident scene may be about four, five, or six minutes. At the same time, hundreds or even thousands of other citizens hear the siren and know that we are on the job and are saving lives (again).
On the other hand, if we had decided to respond to these noncritical, relatively minor trauma calls without red lights and sirens, we would often hear later that “it took 20 minutes” to respond to the scene. As a chief, I have gotten numerous such complaint calls from people who believed they didn’t get the priority service they thought necessary because of the “poor response time.” This was before we decided to use red lights and siren responses as a primary fire department marketing tool.
In reality, the response time for both incidents is very nearly the same. On receipt of a complaint, we review the records and usually determine that the “real” response time was four, five, or six minutes. It didn’t take the “20 minutes,” as it seemed to the mother who was consoling her injured child. The 20-minute “bandage” call now requires staff to spend an hour or more returning phone calls, gathering the complaint’s details, reviewing the records, and comparing the investigation’s findings with the facts and circumstances of the citizen’s complaint.
When we use red lights and sirens to respond, we don’t get many response-time complaints; when we don’t respond this way, response time complaints increase. All such complaints claim that we took 20 minutes (never 10 or 30 minutes) to get to the scene after they called 911.
Still, when we check the facts and discover the actual response time was four minutes and 37 seconds, as encoded on the computer-assisted dispatch system clock by the dispatcher, and tell the complainant of the findings, the person will say, “It sure seemed like 20 minutes.” When we have long response times to critical emergencies, we hear about it, and hope to hear about those incidents. These days, we have to build a strong case to add fire stations; citizens complaining about the service they receive send a strong message in favor of service expansion.
USE THE SITUATION TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
What if we used this information to our advantage? I understand that there are inherent risks to responding through traffic using red lights and sirens. People often don’t react properly by pulling over to the right and stopping to let the fire truck go by. However, if there is no (or very little) response time reduction and our drivers drive just as safely with or without the use of red lights and sirens and if we use traffic signal preemption devices to help clear a path through the backup traffic stopped at a red light, why shouldn’t we let Mom know that we are on the way by activating our emergency lights and siren? Why shouldn’t we let the rest of our community hear or see that we are on the job saving lives or property? At our department, we concluded that the benefits far outweigh the risks, as long as our personnel behave appropriately.
As a result, we audibly advertise the fact that we are on the job and en route to the scene of little Johnny’s skinned knee, and we have avoided a complaint from Johnny’s Mom. She doesn’t complain because she can hear us coming, as can the rest of the community. In any case, they hear their tax dollars at work. In McKinney, Texas, our citizens hear us “go to work” almost all day, every day. Many people comment to me about the sirens they hear in the distance all day, every day. At the same time, most add that they know how hard we work to provide service to the community and thank me for the work of the department.
Very infrequently do these citizens complain because we make so much noise. But there are some. A neighbor came up to me a few months ago while I was working in my yard. He wondered if I required the responding ambulances and fire trucks to blast their air horns three times before proceeding through a four-way stop. I said no, and asked why. Well, he lives on the northwest corner of the intersection that has four-way stop signs. As the fire engine responds to the nearby nursing home (sometimes several times daily), it enters the intersection from the south and makes the left turn. The driver blasts the air horn as he goes through the intersection, and it rattles the windows of his bedroom.
So I asked the Engine 3 crew why they did that every time, day or night. They told me that they did it for me, just to say hello and to let me know that they were on the job. Fortunately, this was just a couple of weeks before a new fire station opened, which changed the first-due engine’s response district and hence reduced the number and frequency of this occurrence.
My neighbor laughed when I reported back to him; it’s now the neighborhood joke that my troops let me know at every opportunity that they are on the job.
About a week later, the destination was our neighbor, who was having a heart attack. It was a great comfort to him during the short response to hear the sirens get closer and closer and know that we would soon arrive. It was marketing.
You are getting the picture. Red lights and sirens really let people know we are on the job. We have gained significant community support because our citizens are keenly aware of how often we respond to emergencies in our community.
MORE BENEFITS THAN RISKS
Every time a citizen sees or hears a fire truck as it responds to an incident, that person thinks about us. More often than not, it’s really, “There they go again!” When they hear the sirens, citizens know we are on the job and are glad that it’s not their emergency. But when it is, they hear us racing to their aid and understand that we care about them.
This is not to say that there aren’t any nonemergency responses. Fire alarm activation calls are most often not an emergency, but we really can’t determine that until the first unit arrives on-scene. Many incidents to which we respond turn out to be slightly different from what was reported. At times, the real incident gets worse over time, so it is a real emergency and should have an emergency response. If we respond as if it were a critical emergency and find that it really isn’t, no harm is done, especially if we respond so as to arrive safely each time we go out the door. If we view the use of red lights and sirens as authorized by law to expedite response to emergency incidents and as a way to advertise to our community that we are on the job, we create a different mindset and get a double benefit with little or contained risks. I think there are more benefits than risk.
Many departments today require their personnel to adhere to all traffic laws even while using emergency equipment, so it doesn’t matter if they are making noise or not. If making noise during responses results in fewer response-time complaints, why not use the siren?
Some people, embarrassed by the nature of the incident or our dramatic arrival at their home or business, request that we not use our lights and sirens. Even so, we have to decide what is right under the reported circumstances. When they make such a request and then complain that it took you too long to arrive, we face a dilemma in the future. Sometimes the officer “lights it up” until the vehicle is much closer to the scene and in an area where it is safe to reduce the Code 3 response to a Code 2.
All in all, sirens provide positive marketing and quicker response times.
MARK WALLACE, MPA, EFO, CFOD, MiFireE , is chief of the McKinney (TX) Fire Department and a former Colorado chief, public safety director/city manager. He is the author of Fire Department Strategic Planning: Creating Future Excellence, Second Edition (Fire Engineering, 2006). He frequently assists organizations to become value-driven and initiate effective strategic planning processes.
