Fire deaths in New York City declined last year -- Newsday.com
Fire deaths in New York City declined 10 percent and fire response times were quicker last year, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledged Monday that pending budget cuts will make keeping those numbers under control a challenge.
"The public doesn't have the income to generate the taxes to pay for more," he said at a new firehouse in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. "We're going to have to do a lot more with less."
In response to a $4 billion deficit through 2010, Bloomberg ordered a citywide slash in spending by 7 percent. He proposed cutting fire department training and reducing the night shift staff at four firehouses in each borough but Queens. Those reductions begin Saturday.
When Bloomberg came into office in 2002, six firehouses were shuttered to trim budget costs. Fire deaths spiked from 97 in 2002 to 125 in 2003, according to the city Fire Department's figures.
Response times during that same period were slower, growing from 4:13 to 4:20.
For 2008, fire deaths totaled 86, down from 95 in 2007, the figures show. Of the 2008 deaths, the leading cause was related to careless smoking.
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said unattended candles, overloaded circuits and careless smoking were the top-three causes in the city's fires.
In an effort to reduce fires and fire-related deaths, the city spent $1 million in U.S. grants to promote the use of smoke detectors and educated 600,000 New Yorkers through various programs on fire prevention and safety, Scoppetta said.
According to the figures, the fire response time to structural fires on average was clocked at 4:12 for 2008, 15 seconds faster than in 2007.
Scoppetta said a change in dispatch protocol sped up responses. Now when a blaze is reported, the dispatcher sends out firefighters to the fire's location while keeping the caller on the phone if more information is needed.
Before, firefighters didn't respond for at least a minute until dispatchers collected as much information as possible on the fire from a caller.
"They have all the information they would've had if we held them in quarters for a minute plus, instead they are on their way and they get there much faster and they still end up with all the information that's available," Scoppetta said.
