Fire Commission Responds to Dispatch Issues

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The Los Angeles Fire Department has been under heavy criticism due to technical difficulties with their dispatch system that has left some people waiting for as long as 45 minutes for an emergency response.

One victim waited those painful 45 minutes for paramedics to arrive after cutting off her finger.

The response took so long that her doctor said too much time had elapsed to reattach her finger.

While some people are blaming the delayed response time on the Fire Department's new dispatch center, Fire Chief Brian Cummings says that no system is perfect.

"There's no system in the world that we can build ever that will achieve that one-hundred-percent accuracy. There's always a circumstance where you can have a failure no matter how many redundancies were built in."

The technical failures are adding to questions about the department's performance after the Los Angeles Times disclosed that for years, fire officials were reporting emergency response times that were faster than they actually were.

"Our average response time on our first resource on scene to an EMS call is four minutes and fifty-five seconds."

But this response time does not include the time it takes to process the emergency call, which is said to take between thirty and ninety seconds.

Assistant Chief Dan McCarthy assures the public that all problems with the dispatch center have been identified.

"We believe we have determined what most of the issues were that were causing us to not deliver voice messages to the stations and in the last few days we have had six-thousand dispatches and I think only one we had an issue with."

While the LAFD continues to work out the problems with its dispatch system, people with emergencies can only hope future calls to the fire department are responded to in a timely fashion.