Fire station optimization: Part 2

We asked a workgroup to take an analytical approach to study the location of fire stations. In the past, the selection of station locations was basically an educated guess, but in the last decade, LF&R has developed some excellent capacity to apply data and analysis to such decisions.  Captain Julio Talero, Batallion Chief Eric Jones, and EMS Supervisor Scott Wiebe used historical data from the depaprtment's database, demographic information, and the City's enterprise geographic information system (GIS) to produce recommendations on how improvements can be made by re-positioning a few fire companies, without adding more personnel.  I am incredibly impressed by the quality of their analysis. We also asked for options, and they produced three, all of which provide a significant increment of improvement to LF&R's capability.

The workgroup's recommendations considered three factors: geographic coverage, unit reliability, and effective response force.  The first is pretty obvious: how well does the plan do in putting resources within timely reach of the locations in the City where critical incidents such as fires and medical emergencies are likely to occur? The second, unit reliability, acknowledges that at any given time a given fire company may not be available: the crew could already be out on another incident, or in training, for instance. Finally, effective response force refers to the ability to assemble enough people and equipment to do the job. You cannot fight a structure fire with three firefighters, and two paramedics are not going to be able to deal with trauma patients at a traffic crash for very long before they need a lot more personnel to do the job properly.

Maximizing coverage, unit reliability, and effective response force is a matter of finding the right mix of both spreading out and concentrating resources.  Finding that mix involved the application of demography, geography, and mathematics, informed by historical data about the fire and EMS workload, census data, and projections for Lincoln's future growth contained in the City's Comprehensive Plan. Focusing on geographic coverage, the pink area on the map below is the area that LF&R can travel to on the street network today within four minutes from Lincoln's current 14 fire stations.  The dark gray area is the 25-year growth area of Lincoln, and there is a faint white border overlay that depicts the current city limits.

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There are 8,469 actual addresses inside Lincoln's city limits that are outside the pink area: more than four minutes from a fire station.  That number will grow dramatically as Lincoln expands into the dark gray area representing the 25 year projected growth.  The 4,182 yellow dots on this next map represent the actual dispatches of fire and medical units in 2010 and 2011 that were inside the city limits, but more than 4 minutes from a fire station.

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Fire station optimization: Part 1
Fire station optimization: Part 2
Fire station optimization: Part 3