Response Time

Re article on Laguna Hills family terrorized by criminals (Jan. 14): I have many questions on the quality and competence of the Orange County Sheriff's Department, but the biggest question is the 20-minute response time. Why? JOHN MEADE Dana Point

Los Angeles Fire Chief Brian Cummings said Tuesday that he will reassign dozens of firefighters from engines to rescue ambulances beginning next month to handle an increase in medical emergencies. The sudden action, coming after months of criticism over the agency's 911 response times and Cummings' leadership, drew immediate opposition from labor groups representing firefighters and department commanders, who warned the change would put firefighters at greater risk. City fire commissioners and a key City Council member also questioned the plan, which calls for adding 11 new ambulances.

If you have a heart attack in the Valley, you can expect to wait nearly seven minutes on average for emergency medical assistance to arrive. In the northeast Valley, you'll probably wait several minutes longer. The Los Angeles Fire Department hopes to shave 2 1/2 minutes off its emergency medical response time with the addition of six paramedic assessment engines for the city, three of which will be assigned to the Valley.

Two key reform efforts intended to address the Los Angeles Fire Department's diminished resources and faulty performance tracking are being delayed, agency officials said Tuesday. Chief Brian Cummings told the city Fire Commission that he is pulling back an ambitious plan requested by the City Council that would boost the department's ranks and speed up lagging 911 response times. In addition, one influential member of the panel announced that a push to overhaul the department's much-criticized data analysis has fallen behind schedule and will miss an April deadline for completion of reforms.

The Los Angeles Police Department said Monday that it has shaved nearly a minute off the time it takes to respond to an emergency. It typically took 8.1 minutes to respond to an emergency during the first six months of this year, compared to 8.9 minutes during the first six months of last year, the Police Department said. Police defined an emergency as a life-threatening or potentially life-threatening situation.

Help is on the way for northeast Valley residents who for years have been forced to endure the longest emergency response times in Los Angeles. Fire officials said this week that they are scouting potential locations for a new station in Panorama City and hope to begin construction by early 1998. "We hope to acquire something by the end of the year and get going as soon as possible," said Emile Mack, planning chief for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The Oxnard City Council has directed its staff to look into allegations by a committee of La Colonia-area business operators who say that city police often do not respond to emergency calls in the low-income neighborhood for up to an hour, if at all. "It really discourages the business people in that area when they (police) don't come at all," Carlos Monroy, who owns La Bodega on Colonia Road, told the City Council on Tuesday. "We all pay our taxes."

A sea of mud hampered the response time of emergency crews racing throughout Laguna Beach to answer hundreds of calls for help Monday night, but a review of dispatch logs and response times shows that police and firefighters did "the best job possible," the city manager said Thursday. After several residents complained that no one responded to their calls for help evacuating, City Manager Kenneth C.

In an effort to speed response time to emergency calls, the Orange County and Anaheim fire departments signed an agreement Friday to eliminate jurisdictional boundaries between the two departments, fire officials said. The agreement will allow firefighters closest to an emergency to respond first, regardless of jurisdiction. Before the agreement, formal requests were necessary to cross into each other's jurisdiction, said Capt. Patrick McIntosh of the Orange County Fire Department.

The city of Ventura knew it was taking a risk last year when it went ahead and started providing municipal ambulance service to its residents even though the county had contracted with a private firm to do so. A legal challenge to a similar setup in another county was headed for the California Supreme Court, and an unfavorable ruling could put Ventura's service out of business. Which is exactly what happened.

It took Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies a minute longer to respond to emergency calls from unincorporated parts of the county than from cities that contract with the department for police services, according to a county audit. The finding comes days after Supervisor Gloria Molina accused Sheriff Lee Baca of "stealing" police resources from residents in unincorporated neighborhoods and threatened to hire "independent private patrol cars" to backfill cuts in sheriff's patrols.

Residents in Pacific Palisades were deeply critical when cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department were proposed nearly four years ago. At a forum for mayoral hopefuls there on Sunday, community members arrived with a question: What would the candidates do to beef up emergency operations and bring down response times? Front-runners Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti each portrayed themselves as fighters for the beleaguered department, which has been under scrutiny since fire officials admitted they'd released misleading performance data for years.

Los Angeles Fire Chief Brian Cummings turned the tables on City Council members Tuesday, blaming increased 911 response times on budget cuts approved by lawmakers. "You gave us a budget," Cummings said during a nearly two-hour City Hall hearing. "We're giving you the most effective Fire Department that we can within that budget. " Cummings was summoned to appear before the council after he failed to produce a plan to improve service and response times, which have grown longer since budget cuts were ordered three years ago after the economic downturn.

Brian Cummings became the man of the moment two years ago when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa needed more than $50 million slashed from the Fire Department. A second-generation LAFD firefighter who quit college to follow in his father's footsteps, Cummings had risen steadily in the department over three decades. An assistant chief, he helped devise a cost-cutting plan to trim engines and ambulances. Cummings, who is personable and energetic, campaigned across the city with a polished PowerPoint presentation showing that even with the cuts, the city could have 911 response times similar to those of pre-recession days, when stations were fully staffed.

Los Angeles Fire Department officials, facing criticism over slow response times to 911 calls, are considering two new strategies that could get rescuers to the scene of medical emergencies more quickly. One program, known as "quick launch," reduced the time it took to get fire units moving by an average of 50 seconds - roughly in half - during a test period in 2006. The experiment allowed dispatchers to send units before fully determining the nature of emergencies, according to internal LAFD documents obtained by The Times . The test was discontinued because so many rescue units were being dispatched that it created gaps in coverage, department officials said during a Fire Commission meeting Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Fire Department, which has been embroiled in a months-long controversy over response-time data, has failed to move decisively to resolve the problem, two Los Angeles City Council members said Friday. In a formal motion, council members Eric Garcetti and Mitch Englander demanded that fire officials appear before the full council as soon as possible to explain why the department has not presented specific actions that could be taken to improve response times by rescuers during life-and-death emergencies.

Inglewood has deployed a fourth paramedic unit to reduce the time it takes ambulances to reach seriously injured victims and compensate for the 90 minutes that rescue teams sometimes spend on the road to and from distant trauma centers. Inglewood Fire Chief Robert Hartzog said the fourth paramedic unit was added because the response times for some patients had reached seven minutes from an optimum of four minutes. "Seven minutes is not at all acceptable for a serious injury," Hartzog said.

Waits for 911 medical aid vary dramatically across Los Angeles and many of the city's most exclusive neighborhoods have the longest response times, according to a Times investigation. Under national standards adopted by the Los Angeles Fire Department, rescuers are supposed to arrive within six minutes to almost all medical emergencies. But the Times analysis found that in affluent hillside communities stretching from Griffith Park to Pacific Palisades, firefighters failed to hit that mark nearly 85% of the time.

A long-awaited review of Los Angeles Fire Department response times has found that the agency used inaccurate data "that should not be relied upon until they are properly recalculated and validated. " The data were used to make critical reductions in fire station staffing last year. Although the Fire Department has previously acknowledged some mistakes in its data, the 32-page report by a task force formed by Fire Chief Brian Cummings found more widespread problems and delved more deeply into factors that contributed to the faulty figures.