How Elmhurst Cut Fire Calls This Year

ELMHURST, IL – The Elmhurst Fire Department has responded to about 5,500 calls for service so far this year.

"This number is a small tick down from last year, but for good reason," Fire Chief Richard "Dick" Dufort said at a City Council meeting this week.

The department's fire prevention bureau, he said, worked hard with one of Elmhurst's larger apartment complexes to replace smoke detectors with rate-of-rise detectors.

"Basically, what that does is it eliminates a lot of false activations where it measures the rate of heat in a room as opposed to smoke," the chief said. "It eliminated about 100 unintentional or false activations, so those are things we look at all the time to reduce some of the calls."

Of the department's calls, two-thirds are emergency medical service-based and the remaining are fire-based, Dufort said.

Although Elmhurst employs a private ambulance service, the fire department responds to most medical calls along with the private paramedics.

Fire departments attract the most attention when they fight structure fires, but those are rare.