Who hasn't seen and heard the California Raisins' rendition of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”? While many of us may know only a couple of bars of the song, it's instantly recognizable to most of the world.

We have a grapevine of sorts in the fire service, and I'm not talking about the firehouse rumor mill that we have contributed to, observed or been victims of. I'm talking about the cascade of events for communications, one of the most critical grapevines in the emergency service. It's the sequence of time, people and processes that take place when an emergency occurs in our communities, and the one that results in our forces getting there quick enough to make a difference. It was originally published in the Commission on Fire Accreditation International's Standards of Cover document, and it was based on earlier definitions provided by Rexford Wilson in “Nine Steps to Extinguishment.”

Let me digress for a moment to make a point. Early in my life I lived in a rural community where we had a volunteer fire department. If anyone needed the volunteer they would call a seven-digit telephone number. There were seven people on a party line who heard that call ringing in their houses. The volunteer fire department had a policy that no one would answer that phone on the first five rings. Everyone counted the rings, then they all picked up at once on the sixth ring. The idea was that if one person heard just part of the message something could go wrong. Better to wait five rings and get everyone on the line. Five rings. Care to guess how long that seems to a to a person with a serious emergency in progress?

Fast forward, if you please, to the early 1970s when the 911 system was created. There are lots of firefighters in stations today who have seen those funky little seven-digit phone number stickers we used to pass out like candy. The jump from the volunteer party-line phone with five dispatch listeners to the creation of 911 encompassed an era where almost every fire department had a seven-digit number and its own dispatch.

Many a headquarters fire station had a small office in the corner where the phone rang and it was answered by a firefighter on duty — not a trained dispatcher. In some cases the old dispatch officer was so close to the bunk room that a middle-of-the-night call was often observed by a gaggle of half-dressed firefighters heading toward their rigs before the bells were even rung. I know when I got stuck with that duty I used it to study up for exams; others slept or watched TV. It was a boring job, punctuated by moments of pressure.

911 changed all that. Don't worry, I'm not going to bash 911 other than to proclaim it's pronounced “nine-one-one,” as there's no “eleven” on a phone. What I am going to raise is a series of observations about what 911 has done to the sequence of events between a person in trouble and a person whose job it is to take care of the trouble. There may be more of a problem than we recognize.

Someone is in trouble — we get there to deal with it! Here's my basic question. Just how long an interval between these two points is reasonable? I know we have been telling people it's supposed to be 60 seconds. Is it truly that, or do we really even know?

You may already know this time frame as alarm-processing time. That definition got a boost in visibility from the CFAI's Standards of Cover and has subsequently been used in many documents. By using the word “time,” however, we're implying that there's a single factor involved. Maybe it's really alarm-processing times. Or maybe there isn't an issue here. Is this an item that even deserves our attention?

My answer is that it depends on whether you really want to know what your service level is in providing a predictable response to your community. This inquiry could take about three minutes of your time, or it could be the topic of several future staff discussions.

The 10-step cascade of events below is based on the Utstein Criterion, a series of events that make up the sequence of survival for cardiac-arrest patients.

1. Event initiation
2. Emergency event
3. Alarm
4. Notification
5. Alarm processing/unit is notified
6. Turnout time/unit leaves station
7. Travel time
8. On-scene time/unit arrives
9. Initiation of action
10. Termination of incident

Here's a question for you. At which point does a person with an emergency get to talk to someone? That's step four. Now answer these: How many links are there in the chain of events before a signal is received by a responding company in step six? How many seconds are involved in each transfer? How many transfers are made before your station is alerted? Are accurate hard-data stamps kept on all of these steps?

If your answers to these questions are one, 60 seconds, one and yes, go to the last paragraph and consider this column done. But if your answers are different or you don't know, you may have some homework to do.

It might be useful if we take a look at the various ways that used to provide fire service communications. You probably have one of them, and you may interact with several others. Here they are:

• Fire dispatch owned and operated by the fire department.
• Fire dispatch owned and operated by the city as a communications department.
• Police and fire dispatch located under police supervision, not a public-safety answering point.
• Regional fire dispatch located under the other government, not a PSAP.
• Police and fire dispatch, operated as a PSAP.

If your emergency service alarm phone system only has one person at one place who can capture the call, you are among the privileged few. Over the last 30 years dispatch service has undergone an evolution toward consolidation, either between police and fire or by going into a multi-jurisdictional system or having some other jurisdiction provide contract services.

So far this isn't a problem, but it seems that some things aren't as easy to count on. For example, the use of cell phones has generated a problem, hasn't it? There are plans to resolve this issue, but currently a person using a cell phone may be talking to another entity in another community when requesting emergency services.

I recently received an e-mail that spelled out one such dilemma. There now are telephone systems that connect through the Internet called VoIP, for Voice-over — Internet Protocol. Do they connect the user with the 911 center when they have an emergency? They do if they're registered to do so with the local 911 provider; otherwise they go off into cyberspace, where the clock keeps on ticking until someone calls the regular 911 system. This is a technological glitch that didn't exist a few years ago.

It's important for fire service managers to be knowledgeable about the entire sequence of events. Moreover, this responsibility demands that we collect verifiable data so that we can perform accurate deployment analyses. It's in our best interest to not accept what we are given unless we have done everything to reduce alarm-processing times to the point where we know how to predict them. All of the emphasis on travel time is gilding a dying lily.

Now I know there are those of you reading this who are saying, “This is so obvious that it doesn't deserve too much attention.” I hope you're right, but recent experiences in reviewing the performance of fire companies has demonstrated to me that this fact is not as “scientific” as we assume it to be.

I can't provide too many examples without making it look like a criticism of an agency. Let me just provide you with a series of questions that you can ask yourself and your dispatch center that tells your department when to go into the response mode.

When a person calls the emergency number, what agency answers first? Is it the fire department or a PSAP? How many transfers are required to get the call into the call queue for a fire-oriented dispatcher? If the call-taker doesn't transfer it directly to the fire department, to whom do they transfer it? How long does that take?

Regardless of who answers the first call, is that data captured electronically or manually? If the data are captured electronically, are all of the elements present — YY:MM:DD:HH:MM:SS? If only whole minutes are captured, there may a problem in using that data to evaluate performance. If the data are captured manually, what's the possibility of delay and what clock is used to identify the manual elements? Is it synchronized with other clocks in the system? Are those clocks only in full minutes?

Once the dispatch data have been transmitted to the fire company, is there a provision for that responding company to indicate that they are actually responding? How is that data documented?

Finally, does the record-keeping system track the time that the unit has declared itself on-scene? Is how long the unit stays committed on the scene recorded? Are there protocols in place to ensure that units cannot or will not place themselves on-scene either too early or too late? What means are in place to quality control over these elements?

Got all of that? How well does your department measure up in this discussion? If you have 100% confidence in this aspect of your dispatch, you are a lucky person. If you have not looked at it in a while, you may have reason to be concerned. Lily Tomlin might have been on the other end of my parents' old ring-down phone system, but what may be on the other end of yours is a potential delay of alarm. Best you be the one to find it out before it becomes a headline on the 6 o'clock news.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.