Fire trucks and ambulances took about as much time as usual to arrive in the days before and after New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers went into effect. That’s despite about 2,000 staff calling out sick partly in protest.
But the staffing shortages have disrupted some normal operations within the city’s fire department (FDNY). An FDNY spokesperson confirmed the department is currently in “fallback” mode, meaning it is assigning fewer teams to some emergencies.
For structural fires, FDNY is assigning two engines, one ladder and a chief if only one person reports the fire. If a second source reports the fire, the dispatchers fill out the assignment to three engines and two ladders, Frank Dwyer, a spokesperson for the FDNY said in an email.
“On other emergencies, such as gas leaks, we are sending one engine and one ladder where we normally send two engines and two ladders,” Dwyer added.
The dispatch data, provided by FDNY, comes after WNYC/Gothamist uncovered that officials had not publicly reported these response times since early August — an omission that technically violates city code.
Since the vaccine mandate deadline on October 29th, fire response times hovered between three and four minutes, according to the partial dataset. That’s on par with the average dispatch and travel durations for August, September and the first few weeks of October.
Emergency medical services (EMS) teams, a subsection of FDNY, also remained steady throughout the same time period, taking between 7 and 8 minutes to arrive on the scene for life-threatening medical emergencies. But the city did not provide data for recent months, so it is unclear if this was faster or slower than usual. From January to July, EMS dispatch and travel time to callers with such emergencies ranged from 8 and a half minutes at its highest to 8 minutes at its lowest.
The data comes after low vaccination rates among first responders spurred fears of idle ambulances and shuttered fire companies due to understaffing. The city’s mandate called for all municipal employees to take at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine or face unpaid leave. On the eve of last Friday’s deadline, FDNY ranked among the bottom of all city agencies in vaccine coverage — 23% of EMS staff and 32% of firefighters remained unvaccinated.
FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro had predicted 20% of ambulances and fire companies could be out of service come Monday, but this calamity was averted thanks to a late surge of shots.
As of November 3rd, 21% firefighters remain unvaccinated, compared with 10% of EMS workers and about 8% of all city employees.
“We do understand they bolster their response times by decreasing the number of rigs that are going to responses,” Andrew Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which has contested the fire department’s data in the past, said at a press conference in midtown on Thursday.
Call TImes
Despite these reported response times, people could still be struggling with the city's emergency system. Debbie, who lives in Manhattan and asked for her last name to not be published, told WNYC/Gothamist she was unable to connect to a 911 operator when she called for a health emergency in the early hours of November 1st, the day enforcement began for the mandate.
“I dialed over a half a dozen times and got a busy signal,” she said, adding that she tried via her landline and a cellphone. She ultimately recovered from what she said was either heart-related or bad indigestion.
The city’s 911 dispatches are primarily managed by the NYPD, which had more than 8,000 unvaccinated staff due out on Monday.
We are extremely exhausted and understaffed.
“We are extremely exhausted and understaffed,” said one 911 call dispatcher who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
All staff were ordered to work 12 hour shifts as of October 31st, and some were told as their shifts were ending they had to stay on even longer than that, they said. They didn’t think the full 911 line had gone quiet because the mandatory overtime kept the call centers full — but added that fielding emergency calls for upwards of 12 hours a day had been emotionally draining.
“It’s all hands on deck,” they said. “You never expect what’s going to come in. It’s been a lot.”
An NYPD spokesperson said there were no 911 service disruptions on November 1st, and police commissioner Dermot Shea told reporters on Monday that only 74 of his employees had been put on unpaid leave. He also said 6,000 staff were requesting vaccine exemptions.
The Ariel Russo Act
As of Thursday morning, Nigro said just four out of 350 fire units were out of service, although some others were understaffed. (By the evening, the number of closed fire companies had fallen to zero, an FDNY spokesperson said.) Nigro added that EMS teams were also keeping up.
“We actually had a few more ambulances out than we might've normally had out,” he said Thursday. “Our response times are equal to any other time of the year, and we're providing the service that people expect.”
But more comprehensive data is unavailable, despite a rule in New York City’s administrative code stating that response times need to be shared with the public on a monthly basis. The numbers must also be broken down by both borough and community district. The most recent data on the city’s 911 reporting website is for August and is only divided up by borough. And the same dataset on the city’s Open Data portal hasn’t been updated in more than a year.
The code, Local Law 119, is also known as the Ariel Russo Response Time Reporting Act. It’s named after a 4-year-old girl who was struck and killed by a teen driver fleeing from police in 2013. Russo’s death was blamed in part on the delayed arrival of emergency responders.
The law requires the fire department to make monthly and annual reports to the city and the public on how long it takes for firefighters and EMS workers to arrive at the scene of an emergency. The city council passed the local law in 2013, then updated it in 2017 to require community district-level reporting.
A spokesperson for the fire department said that a “technical problem” is to blame for the reporting delay. The bug pre-dates the vaccine mandate, and the fire department will publish the data as soon as it’s corrected, the spokesperson said, although he didn’t explain when or how the fire department would fix the issue.
In the past, the monthly updates have shed light on how ambulance response times differed by borough and surged during the darkest days of the coronavirus pandemic. Without them, it’s hard to tell how first responders are faring.
