Coming to the Rescue: Firefighting as a Vocation
3 minutes and 45 seconds. That’s the time it took from the moment the tones went off at station 10 to the moment the fire truck pulled up to the front of a home in northeast Salem. Another 8 minutes or so later, and the patient had been loaded into the back of an ambulance, and was being transported to a nearby hospital. That’s considered an above-average response time by the Salem Fire Department, who has a target response time of 5 minutes and 30 seconds for 85% of the calls within the city limits. When you dial 911, a call-taker has recorded your information — address, nature of the emergency, symptoms, age, gender, and any other relevant information — and passed that on to a dispatcher (both of whom work off-site). The dispatcher sends out tones to— or “taps out” — the appropriate apparatus; the lights in the hallways that are otherwise left off suddenly come on, and an automated voice comes over the station loudspeaker, stating the apparatus to respond, the type of emergency, and