The Lexington Fire Department is seeking national accreditation with the Center for Public Safety Excellence and the Commission for Fire Accreditation International. Fire Chief Jason Wells spelled out the process earlier this week before the Lexington Council’s Social Services and Public Safety Committee. He said one objective is to lower fire response time in urban and rural areas.
“Our goal is to reduce all of those times by 90 seconds. And we think we can accomplish that through improvements in dispatch technologies, station alerting, and improved routing and mapping. And then we’ll have to look at where are the gaps and do we need to add any additional resources,” said Wells.
As a part of pursuing this accreditation, the Division of Fire and Emergency Services has developed its first-ever Community Risk Assessment Standards of Cover. The C-P-S-E manual defines community risk assessment as the identification of the potential and likely risks within a particular community and the process of prioritizing those risks.
In addressing the Council’s Social Services and Public Safety Committee Fire Captain Jeremy Cooper told members travel times for the first unit vary from 4:40 inside the urban services boundary to about 9:30 out in some rural areas.
“Obviously the times in the rural areas are gonna be longer because most of our resources are centered to the urban services area where most of our population and density runs occur. So, it’s gonna take longer to get units out into the rural areas because frankly there aren’t as many runs out there. Therefore our resources aren’t out there,” said Cooper.
Cooper said the times are extended to get the full response of 17 firefighters to the fire scenes.
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