Getting one more crack at it
GREENWICH — It took 7 minutes and 30 seconds for a Greenwich fire engine to reach the scene of a serious bus collision on upper King Street in early April.
“The community is often focused on just fires. But as we saw with that bus crash, we handle more incidents than just fires,” said Assistant Chief Robert Kick.
Fires, crashes, and how long it takes emergency responders to get to them — particularly in Northwest Greenwich — has been subject of discussion in Greenwich for years, renewed once again as the Fire Department, once again, seeks money to start the process of locating a station in the northwest, the least protected region of town.
Fire Department personnel extricated five people from a bus carrying passengers with special needs that April afternoon after two buses collided. Kick said the response time to the incident was far from ideal.
“Our average travel time for the entire town of Greenwich is four minutes, four seconds. But the average travel time for northwestern Greenwich is just under seven minutes,” he said.
The national standard for fire emergencies is 4 minutes. Kick said in the northwest quadrant, the department is never meeting that standard.
“Some of the response times we have up there, Cutler Road, Locust Road, they’re 11 minutes. That’s more than double the standard we try to achieve. There’s no getting away from that — it’s the travel distance,” the assistant chief said.
The longer it takes to get to a scene, the worse the outcome, he continued.
“When we arrive in a timely fashion, four or five minutes, we can often do much more with the resources we have there early,” Kick said. “With an 11-minute arrival, often the fire has gone from the room of origin, and past our ability to control it. More lives are at risk.”
Another major incident in the northwest corner was a fire in an unoccupied house at 1415 King Street in August.
Firefighters from the Glenville company, closest to the fire site, reached the house fire in 11 minutes, according to the department. The building was a total loss.
Allen Williams, president of the Northwest Greenwich Association, has been lobbying for years for a new fire station in that part of town. He said the community is “angry, frustrated and disgusted” with the greater reponse times in his neighborhood.
Williams said the North Stamford section of Greenwich’s neighboring city, which shares similarities with the northwest end of Greenwich, has better fire protection. “Stamford FD has a station (Turn of River) literally right next to the Merritt Parkway, with quick access to its backcountry,” he noted. Another Stamford station in positioned above the parkway, and one more just below it.
The Stamford Fire Department has been rolling out an upgraded, computeraided dispatch system that cuts a minute or two minutes or more off the response times. According to Stamford fire officials, response times in North Stamford average 5 minutes, 33 seconds.
Kick noted that some neighboring communities, like Stamford, have advantages when it comes to fire protection, especially smaller coverage areas. “Smaller square mileage, and more resources. Their efforts to meet the standard will be better than ours,” Kick said.
Town officials have been divided over the issue of whether a new fire station is warranted. First Selectman Peter Tesei has been a proponent of the measure, but budget-hawks in other sections of town government have been reluctant to go along.
Late last month, the Representative Town Meeting Budget Overview Committee voted in favor of making a motion to remove a $100,000 item to find a site for a new fire station from the 2019-20 proposed town budget. The committee chairwoman, Chair Lucia Jansen, said it has not been determined if the station is necessary to improve fire coverage in town.
The BOC has blocked a northwest station in the past. In 2016, the committee made a successful motion to remove funding to purchase property for one after arguing there was not enough data to support building the station. Its members called for the study of fire coverage instead. Then in 2017, when a study was proposed in the budget, the BOC made a successful motion to have it removed.
Jansen recently said she is in favor of a $75,000 independent study of fire coverage and fire department response times — which also is included in next year’s proposed budget. The RTM is set to vote on the budget Monday.