Incidents

Our purpose in emergency services is crystal clear: save lives, protect property, and promote public safety through prevention and education.

Collecting and using data—whether from calls, our internal trainings, or public education events—can help us provide improved AND more cost-effective services to our community. It can show what is working well, what isn’t, what is changing over time, and how effective intentional changes have been in meeting our purpose.

However, data is not the be-all and end-all. It is an important tool, but just one of a handful we use to see how we’re doing and where we can improve.

Key Points

  • A call, or incident, is anytime dispatch receives a 911 call that is in our district or and assistance request from beyond our district.
  • These numbers represent the last 30 days of calls except where we also display the number of calls in the past 365 days.
  • This data is recomputed every morning and comes directly from ESO, our incident and medical reporting software.
  • Only incidents which are finished and have had all the paperwork finalized are included. The vast majority of incident reports are finished within a few hours, though larger, more complicated, multi-day incident reports, such as for wildland fires, may take upwards of 3 days to complete.
  • All time statistics are the median, or the typical 50%, over the past 30 days.
  • Times are logged by dispatch from communication over a single radio frequency, which can cause the logging of times to be delayed if the airway is clogged with voice traffic.
  • It’s important to state that this data is provided in good faith and as-is, as defined in the disclaimer.

Definitions

  • Responders:
    • Responder Time on Calls: This is the total amount of time your responders have spent on active calls in their community in the past 30 days. Some scenes can get complex with responders and apparatus coming and going, and this number tracks that down to the level of the individual responder. It doesn’t include return travel to the station, clean-up time, equipment maintenance time, or training hours.
    • Unique Responders: How many responders responded to one or more incidents in the past 30 days.
  • Incident Times:
    • Reaction Time: This is the time from when dispatch tells us they received a 911 call to when responders are dressed in the appropriate equipment, vehicle has been inspected with a full walk-around, all responders are buckled in their seats, and the vehicle is moving forward. We don’t want to travel with open doors or coffee mugs on the rear tailboard! And the days of just hopping into or on a moving vehicle are long gone.
    • Travel Time: The amount of time from when an apparatus is moving to when it arrives on scene. These times are broken out based upon the incident regions, which roughly correspond to:
      • Central: The central part of the island, from a rough line around Egg Lake Road to Friday Harbor.
      • North: North of Egg Lake Road out to Roche Harbor and beyond.
      • South: South and West of Town, along Cattle Pt. Rd. and Bailer Hill.

The code for the website and statistics reporting can be found on SJIF&R’s Github repository [data, code].

SJIF&R follows a national standard around logging and grouping of incident data, and this data is integrated into the regional and national medical and incident reporting systems, such as the National Fire Incident Reporting System.