Owensboro Fire Department responded to nearly 8,500 total calls for service in 2022, including 300 fires and 5,615 EMS/rescue runs. OFD Chief James Howard said that’s down about 12.7% in comparison to the previous year, and the drop is in large part due to the department altering its strategy on responding to certain types of calls.
“In 2021, we had 9,656 calls, so we cut 1,200 runs out of the year just by the virtue of the call processing changes we made [starting on] Halloween night,” Howard said.
In December, Howard told city officials there has been a 24% increase in calls over the past 5 years, with rescue and emergency medical services calls being the major contributor. However, there was often not an actual emergency in many of those cases. The constant run for non-emergencies on top of an already high workload that includes recruitment and maintenance had begun to take a toll on the department internally, Howard said.
Howard presented that the department changed the criteria that they respond to citing employee morale and fatigue as overarching problems throughout the department.
Starting in November, OFD directly responded to only accidents with injuries, cardiac arrests, drownings, jumpers, shootings and stabbings, and suicide attempts with bleeding (in addition to all manner of fire responses).
After seeing the effect the lower volume of calls had on employees, OFD continued that practice into December.
“If you extrapolate that over the year, we expect a significant cut in our run volume without cutting a single fire response or alarm activation or any of those things — just by honing in our medical runs with the emergency medical dispatch implementation,” Howard said.
In total, the 2022 response breakdown for OFD was as follows:
- 300 fires reported
- 49 structure fires
- 32 cooking fires
- 42 vehicle fires
- 177 unlisted responses
- 5,615 EMS and Rescues:
- 1,069 respiratory responses
- 685 traumatic injury
- 706 cardiac responses
- 3,155 unlisted responses
Howard said EMS/rescue responses accounted for 67% of last year’s nearly 8,500 total calls. False alarms represented 10% of calls, while miscellaneous responses such as gas leaks, power line down, service calls, and canceled en route were about 20% of the calls.
