Dense cities respond to fires faster

An investigation by The Boston Globe found that firefighters respond faster to blazes in Boston and other big cities than they do to fires in many suburbs. A January series of articles revealed that the response time of American fire departments is lengthening, putting more Americans at risk. A key factor is the inability of many outlying communities to staff their professional or volunteer fire departments adequately. This news is a mixed blessing for new urbanists. On the one hand, it affirms what new urbanists have known all along: Firefighters can quickly respond to emergencies in cities with narrow streets — the kind of streets that suburban fire chiefs often oppose. The Globe series shows that suburban sprawl poses a danger that is rarely acknowledged. “America’s fire departments are giving fires a longer head start, arriving later each year, especially in the suburbs round Boston, Atlanta, and other cities, where growth is brisk but fire staffing has been cut,” wrote correspondent Bill Dedman. “Once a day on average in this country, someone dies when firefighters arrive too late,” the investigation discovered. double-edged sword On the other hand, the Globe’s findings could be used to argue that no design impediments should be created that might slow the already tardy suburban fire departments. From 1986 to 2002, the proportion of professional fire departments that sent personnel to a fire within six minutes of receiving the alarm — which is the firefighting profession’s goal — fell to 58 percent from 75 percent. Among volunteer departments, the record is much worse. In 2002, volunteer departments reached only 14.3 percent of fires within six minutes. “Across the nation from 1986 through 2002, more than 4,000 people died in fires in which response time was greater than six minutes,” Dedman wrote. Fire chiefs have often argued that they need wide streets to maneuver their large trucks. Some new urbanists, such as Robert Freedman, director of urban design for Toronto, Ontario, have tried to counter the wide-streets argument by downsizing the fire equipment. “I have been trying to convince our mayor that we need to purchase smaller fire trucks — at least in the older parts of the city (where we are also trying to build new infill projects with narrow, tree-lined streets),” Freedman told New Urban News. If suburban fire departments are strapped for funds, however, they may reject the idea that they should purchase smaller firefighting apparatus. Stephen Lawton, director of community development for Hercules, California, says, “Our fire agency, and the surrounding ones, are sized too small [in staffing] to respond to significant events … when they get there, they want to have one of everything on the truck so that the small crew with minimal backup can handle any of a wide range of situations.” The Globe calculated that as a share of municipal budgets, “fire spending has slipped, from 6.1 percent in fiscal 1987 to 5.7 percent in fiscal 2003.” New urbanists might stand a better chance of winning arguments on street width if fire departments had more financial resources — and thus felt they could afford to be more flexible. Lawton says that in the current environment, fire officials try to meet their requirements “by specifying ever-bigger equipment.” “If there’s a way I can get my Chief more money (for men, not machines), I will do it,” Lawton says. “My advice is to get into a trusting kind of relationship with a chief and keep asking ‘why,’ to drill down from geometry into the underlying practices and unquestioned assumptions that drive the need for larger equipment everywhere.” Meanwhile, Cara Seiderman, bicycle coordinator for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests that cities respond more quickly to fires than sprawling suburban and exurban municipalities partly because of density. She notes, for example, that dense communities have more fire stations close to more homes. Dense patterns of development possess certain efficiencies — which sometimes save lives. u