Since the Queens fire dispatch center, in Forest Park, began an experiment last month to dispatch trucks faster, average response times to structural fires have been reduced by 24 seconds.
For the dispatcher, it is a short conversation, often with a person in distress.
When someone calls to report a fire, speed, precision and clarity can save lives. That makes Queens a special challenge for the New York Fire Department.
In a borough of immigrants from more than 100 nations, firefighters say emergency calls can come in languages, dialects and accents that render an address or a description of a fire scene beyond their comprehension. Add to that a street numbering system that confuses even those who were born there.
“Someone might say there is a fire on 137th Road instead of 137th Street, and that is the other side of the borough,” said James Ernst, a dispatcher at the fire communications center in Queens. “People get excited when they call, and you have to be assertive to get the information right.”
The difficulties in Queens, the largest borough by land area, have long been reflected in slower fire response times. Last year, fire officials said, the average for Queens was 4 minutes 58 seconds, compared with a citywide average of 4 minutes 27 seconds.
But now, in an experiment that has provoked scorn from the largest firefighters’ union and criticism from some elected officials in Queens, the department is trying to speed response times in the borough by shortening the time dispatchers spend on the phone before they send firefighters out the door. Rather than waiting to elicit such details as the nearest cross street, the room or floor where a fire is located, and the phone number of the 911 caller, the dispatchers have been told to find out what is on fire, get the address, repeat the address and immediately send firefighters.
The other details, fire officials say, can easily be communicated by radio as the trucks are on the move. But the union, the Uniformed Firefighters Association, maintains that the new policy has been proven disastrously flawed and has hampered the response to three Queens fires, two of them involving fatalities, since Feb. 21. Fire officials deny the union’s claims.
“We are not endangering anyone, just getting there faster,” said Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. Since the 90-day experiment started on Feb. 14, he said, average response times to structural fires in the borough have been reduced by 24 seconds.
“A couple of weeks of an experiment is not enough to make long-term decisions,” Mr. Scoppetta said. But he called the results in Queens “an astonishing, unprecedented cut” in response times that could lead to similar changes across the city.
Every second counts in Queens, with its many neighborhoods of small wood-frame houses that tend to ignite more easily and burn more rapidly than the brick, concrete and masonry homes in much of the city.
“Burn time is quicker,” said Leroy G. Comrie Jr., a member of the City Council who represents Jamaica, Hollis and other parts of southeast Queens.
But he said putting pressure on dispatchers to get trucks out the door more quickly may do more harm than good.
“With such a diversity of languages and dialects, and such duplicity of street numbers, it is critical for the Fire Department to get a full description of where a home is before people are dispatched,” he said.
Like those in the other boroughs, the Queens dispatch center is a free-standing building, located in a park to protect it from sabotage or fires in adjoining structures. The center, in Forest Park, receives about 400 calls a day, most of them medical emergencies or from people worried about gas leaks or other hazards, said Henry Dingman, the department’s deputy director for dispatching operations. About 20 calls are about fires.
Typically, people who call 911 talk first to a police dispatcher, who transfers the call to a fire dispatcher, known as an “alarm receipt dispatcher,” at the first mention of a fire.
During two hours on one afternoon last week, Mr. Ernst, of the Queens center, was on alarm receipt duty and fielded three calls about potential fires.
A call at 1:05 p.m. was typical. The caller told Mr. Ernst the address, 43-25 43rd Street, which is in Sunnyside, and that there was something on fire inside a building. Mr. Ernst, typing the information into his computer, repeated the address back to the caller. About 15 seconds elapsed.
Under the old system, the one still followed in the rest of the city, Mr. Ernst would have pressed for more details before the firehouse was alerted. Instead, Mr. Ernst hit a button on his console, which fed the information to John Burke, whose job was what the department calls the decision dispatcher. In five seconds, Mr. Burke reviewed the address for obvious errors and, finding none, he sent an alarm signal by computer to Ladder Company 163, at 41-24 51st Street, about a half-mile away. By 1:06 p.m., trucks were on their way.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ernst stayed on the line, asking the caller for a return phone number, but did not learn much more because the caller had observed the building from the outside. Had more dire information come in, for instance if people were trapped, it would be up to Mr. Burke to dispatch more firefighters and equipment. A third dispatcher, known as the radio dispatcher, contacts firefighters on the way to the scene if any information changes.
“The worst ones can be when people are just hysterical,” Mr. Ernst said in a pause between calls. “You have to get them to calm down and make themselves understood.”
Firefighters reported back at 1:08 that they were on the scene, making the response time to this fire about three minutes, well below the Queens average. And in this case, the quick response may have kept a small fire from getting out of hand. “It wasn’t much,” said Mr. Burke; firefighters at the scene reported they had put out a small blaze on a kitchen stove.
Whether the Queens experiment had any bearing on the response to three recent fires remains a subject of disputes.
On Feb. 25, a fire in Hollis killed Emma Calendar, 87. Union officials charged that too few vehicles were initially sent to the scene, contending that two ladder trucks were called for under department policy and only one was sent. Fire officials said only one ladder truck should be sent on the first report of a fire if a second is not readily available. Officials also said the union complaint ignored a detail in department policy: they said a second ladder truck was sent immediately when a second caller reported the blaze, as was required.
On Feb. 21, when a boy, Jason Guallpa, 5, died in a house fire in Corona, firefighters had been dispatched to a different address close to the scene of the blaze. On Feb. 26, when Firefighter Robert Grove was hospitalized for burns, his fire company had been dispatched to a wrong address in Jamaica, but one that was close enough for them to spot the fire and then respond to it.
Union officials said that those fires underscored the risks of sending firefighters out too quickly, without taking the time to verify locations. Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the firefighters’ union, said that what Queens really needs is more trucks and personnel, not new rules for its dispatchers.
“The real issue remains that there is not enough fire coverage in Queens,” Mr. Cassidy said. “The department has implemented another Band-Aid approach with disastrous results.”
But the tapes of the 911 calls during each of the fires, which were made available by the department, showed that it was the 911 callers who had the addresses wrong. The dispatchers repeated the addresses back to the callers before sending firefighters to the scene.
“People have always reported wrong addresses,” Mr. Scoppetta said. He said the callers from Corona and Jamaica, passers-by who used their cellphones and did not live in the homes that were on fire, had apparently directed dispatchers to the addresses of nearby buildings where they saw smoke but did not see flames.
“They would have gotten them just as wrong before the experiment in Queens,” Mr. Scoppetta said.
