Menlo Park Fire District Seeks to Improve Emergency Response Times

The Menlo Park Fire Protection District Board of Directors unanimously approved a “time based performance standard” this week, hoping to improve response times for emergencies.

The approval came at a meeting Tuesday after Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman presented a report to the board, as well as a video documenting how traffic and road designs have negatively impacted the district’s response times, according to the fire district.

The district serves the communities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and areas of unincorporated San Mateo County.

According to the newly adopted standard, “the goal of the first response multi-unit shall be to arrive on-scene of all code three emergencies within seven minutes” and “multi-unit responses shall be to have all units on scene within 11 minutes, 90 percent of the time,” according to the fire district.

“We need to establish a base line for acceptable, time-based, service delivery while documenting and advocating for improvements. This video allows the public to see what our challenges are when it comes to response,” Schapelhouman said in a statement.

“Bad things can happen if we don’t get there quickly.”

In the 18-minute video, a fire apparatus dash camera recorded firefighters responding to a multi-vehicle collision on the Dumbarton Bridge on Aug. 27 at 5:31 p.m.

The video depicts a fire truck traveling into and through Palo Alto, which is in a different jurisdiction, because of traffic and road design on Willow Road in Menlo Park, fire officials said.

In the video, the truck is forced to travel in the opposite lanes of traffic for almost half of the trip because of gridlock traffic.

Firefighters ultimately took about 16 minutes to reach the emergency, which turned out to include three individuals who needed medical attention.

“We’ll be looking at our unit deployment next, but I’m not sure what else we can do to improve our overall response times given deteriorating road congestion conditions,” Schapelhouman said.

--City News Service