Fire Response Time
Safest City In America
Status Indicators: Proceeding as Anticipated | Monitoring Progress | Reviewing for Improvement | Information Unavailable
Status Indicators:
Proceeding as Anticipated
Monitoring Progress
Reviewing for Improvement
Information Unavailable
Please note that Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 refer to the first, second, third, and fourth quarters of the Fiscal Year. The City’s Fiscal Year runs from October 1st – September 30th and is denoted by FY.
In the 1st quarter of FY19, there were 24 emergency fire incidents within city limits. 18 of the 24 calls had first-arriving units respond in less than 08:30. The average response time of all calls was 07:58. This places us below target for the quarter, with only 75% of emergency calls reaching our goal of 80% in less than 08:30.
5 out of the 6 fire incidents with response times above 08:30 were vehicle fires. Vehicle fires are notoriously difficult to respond to due to traffic and often have misleading or incorrect directions provided to dispatch by reporting parties. There were 4 structure fires included in response time calculations during this time period. Each of these structure fires had response times below 08:30; the average response time for these calls was 07:31. There were 3 cooking fires, which are fires that occur in the oven/on the stove-top, and do not show any extension into the surrounding structure itself. One of the three cooking fires had a response time over 08:30.
In October of 2018, City of Sugar Land Fire-EMS, alongside Sugar Land dispatch, began a new system of call prioritization based upon call acuity. This new call prioritization system was based on a recommendation from the Fire-EMS assessment provided from an independent consulting firm in 2017. This new system means that emergency Fire and EMS units are traveling to low acuity calls without lights and sirens. This system is meant to apply the appropriate level of risk required to respond efficiently and effectively to the incident at hand. Therefore, if a unit is on response to a non-emergency call with lights off, and the call gets upgraded to emergency status, lights will be turned on at that given point in the response. Since more calls are being responded to non-emergency, we expect to see a slight increase in response times city-wide.
The effects of this new call prioritization system will continue to be monitored by the department.
| Type | Count | % of total |
| Building Fire | 5 | 21% |
| Passenger Vehicle Fire | 10 | 42% |
| Dumpster/Rubbish Fire | 4 | 17% |
| Cooking Fire | 3 | 13% |
| Equipment Fire | 0 | 8% |
| Aircraft Fire | 0 | 0% |
| RV Fire | 0 | 0% |
| Fire, other | 2 | 1% |
| Grass Fire | 0 | 0% |
| Mailbox Fire | 0 | 0% |
Time elapsed between receipt of an Emergency Building Fire Call within corporate city limits by the telecommunications operator to the arrival of the first Sugar Land Fire – EMS (SLF -EMS) unit on scene.
SLF-EMS Unit: A fire apparatus designed to be used under emergency conditions to transport personnel and equipment and support the suppression of fires or mitigation of other hazardous situations.
Emergency Fire Calls: Calls within city limits coded NFIRS Incident Types 100-170, which includes, but is not limited to: structure fire, vehicle fire, natural vegetation fire, and cooking fire.
Results are reported as the percentage of Emergency Fire Calls responded to within the target time of 08:30 (mm:ss).
80% of all responses to Emergency Fire Calls within 08:30 (mm:ss). This target includes a 01:00 dispatch call processing time and 07:30 response time.
A rapid response to emergency calls helps to save lives, prevent unnecessary property loss, and ensure public safety.
Contact Information
City of Sugar Land
2700 Town Center Blvd. North
Sugar Land, TX 77479
Office of Strategic Initiatives
Contact (281) 275-2198
www.sugarlandtx.gov
[email protected]