FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced Tuesday the “Modified Response” program which has been in effect in Queens since October will now expand to Staten Island and Brooklyn.
“Firefighters who work in Brooklyn and Staten Island, along with the three million people who reside in those boroughs, will soon benefit from our expansion of this new protocol into their communities,” Commissioner Cassano said in press release. “With accidents down 32% since we began this pilot program six months ago, fewer firefighters and civilians have been injured as a result, even though we’re responding to more non-emergency calls than ever before.”
When responding to some non-life threatening or non-emergency calls, apparatus will not activate lights and sirens, will travel at reduced speeds, and “obey all traffic regulations.” For calls which normally require 5 units, only the first rig will respond in “emergency mode.” The others will follow the “modified response.” The press release states fire officers can change the response mode either based on more information from dispatch or evaluation at the incident.
Read FDNY’s full press release about the specific kind of calls impacted here.
Implementation of the program to Brooklyn and Staten Island comes a month after the deadly collision between Ladder 81 and a van of adults with developmental disabilities. One person in the van died in the crash, and a preliminary investigation the day after the accident concluded the apparatus ran the red light. Ladder 81 was responding to a vehicle fire. Tuesday, officials told SILive.com they didn’t know when the final report would be complete.
More from SILive.com is here.
FireTruckBlog.com’s coverage of the March 9 collision is here and here.
Chesterfield Countyl, Va. has the same program almost. There the call response is based on several factors anyhting life threatining or potetial risk to mass harm or destruction automaticvally recieves a Priority 1 response from all dispatched units. A Prriority 2 response is where there is a potential but not serious enough threat wherethe closet unit or the ALS unit rsponds P1 and all others P3. Priority 3 is where there is no evidence of any type of life threatening emergency,all units run non emergency to the scene, such as back pain, stomach pain w/o being pregnat or shortness of breath associated with it. All this came about in when a county volunteer ambulance ran a red light running hot to a child diff breathing when all it was a child had a cold. The ambulance struck a mini van killing it’s driver who was in fact a member of the squad responding to the call, also killing two children and critically injuring 3 more. So now it it up to the 911 call taker to determine the priority response of each unit icluding all 24 fire stations and 20 fire medics and all 4 county volunteer squads with 9 stations total between them