Hot, Warm, and Cold Responses
Firehouse has a good article about some jurisdictions that don't respond to all 911 calls with lights and sirens.
In St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, those fire trucks and ambulances blending in with normal traffic just may be headed to an incident.While flashing lights and screaming sirens are the norm in most jurisdictions, some officials are taking a long, hard look at response methods, as the number of crashes involving emergency vehicles continues to rise.
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Units are instructed to respond one of three ways, hot, warm or cold. And, dispatchers have a pre-determined list of response criteria. Williams said on a warm response, only the first due piece runs with lights and siren. The others come in cold.
Calls that still generate a hot response include working fires, patients with respiratory or cardiac problems and serious trauma. "Everything can be upgraded to an urgent call once an officer arrives or additional information is obtained. We're not putting lives in jeopardy," Simpson said.
This makes good sense. Not all calls that we have here my hometown need a hot response. I know it would reduce the possibility of car wrecks during the response.
Comments
We've been doing this for years. On alarms, only the 1st in piece goes emergency traffic, everything elses is routine. All medical calls are emergency, because we only run as first responders. When the dispatchers do the EMD and decide that the call is serious enough for a fire engine to go on it, then it's a hot response. If it's a less serious call where the EMS unit is going to be running cold, 9 times out of 10, we're not sent anyway.
Posted by: FireResQGuru at February 1, 2006 01:10 PM
