Dallas Fire-Rescue will no longer automatically send ambulances to non-highway, low-speed car accidents that don’t involve serious injuries, according to a Dallas Morning News Editorial.
Instead it will send only fire apparatus, which always carry at least one trained paramedic and all the medical gear needed to treat any injuries.
Should an ambulance be necessary to transport anyone to the hospital, one can be readily dispatched and arrive within minutes, a fire official recently told the Dallas City Council’s public safety committee, the report said.
Other changes include scaling back how the department responds to the nearly 14,000 automatic fire alarm calls it receives annually. That’s roughly 38 each day. Yet, last year only 16 of them, not even close to 1%, were actually the result of structure fires, the fire official said.
From now on, the department will send only an apparatus to those calls that occur between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., instead of both a pumper and a ladder truck. And during the day, when the department normally dispatches only an apparatus to alarms, those units will operate under the less serious Code 1 level, without lights and sirens blaring, according to the report.
The other cutback involves allowing firefighters to handle people stuck in elevators and not requiring a battalion chief to show up.
