Fire Station Brownouts Shown to Slow Response

Rolling brownouts at city fire stations appear to be increasing emergency response times in those districts where engine, truck and ambulance companies are taken out of service as a result of citywide budgetary cutbacks, a preliminary Los Angeles Fire Department study indicates.

“Response times by engine companies were overall almost a minute slower than in the comparable non-browned-out period (last year),” said the report, which studied data for a recent six-day period at the 19 fire districts affected by the brownouts. Response to 700 incidents was 6 minutes, compared to 5.1 minutes last year.

Paramedic responses to 79 emergency medical calls, which included 16 heart attacks, averaged 6.5 minutes--a 42-second increase.

Officials stressed that the data, which analyzed fewer than 800 incidents of the 250,000 expected this year, may not be statistically significant. The brownouts withdraw crews from service on a rotating basis to avoid closing fire stations.