Paul Bass Photo
AMR ambulances in the Hill.
New Haven can’t turn down the volume on ambulance or fire-engine sirens, but it can still lessen some of the noise — and it’s trying.
So reported New Haven’s emergency management and fire chiefs and the regional head of American Medical Response (AMR) ambulance company.
Facing both a steady increase in emergency medical calls as well as public complaints about noise, they have been working along with city Chief Administrative Officer Mike Carter to find ways to lessen the noise.
The four officials offered an update on that quest — which began in 2014 at Mayor Toni Harp’s direction after complaints from the business community — at an unusual joint meeting with a single citizen at City Hall.
Carter, emergency management chief Rick Fontana, Fire Chief John Alston Jr., and AMR regional chief Chuck Babson met in Carter’s office late last week with a University of Bridgeport law professor named Ryan Knox, who has been consistently contacted the city over the past two years about the increasing frequency of deafening sirens outside the Taft apartment building at College and Chapel streets, where he lives. They updated Knox on their efforts and explained what they can’t do.
“It’s really an explosion in the last few years. It’s constant,” Knox told them. “We’re known as ‘Siren City.’”
Fontana, Babson and Alston said that sirens in New Haven are set at the same levels as those in all other communities in the country, based on National Fire Protection Association standards.
Also, Fontana noted, New Haven is the only one of Connecticut’s five largest cities to train all firefighters as emergency medical technicians. That means that often two or three crews — one AMR ambulance crew, a fire engine crew, and a fire paramedic crew, all with sirens blaring — show up at medical calls that might see only one or two elsewhere. Downtown, “canyons” between tall buildings magnify those sirens even further.
And emergency medical calls have increased 6 to 7 percent a year for the past five years as the population ages, according to Babson. The city handled a total of around 40,000 emergency medical calls this past year, Fontana said: fire crews participated in 25,000 of them, while AMR handled the other 15,000 alone.
“We do have more ambulances on the road. No doubt about it. We’re looking at data to make it better. We’ve made some changes,” Fontana said. “This is not falling on deaf ears.”
Not All Calls
Mike Carter, Rick Fontana, Chuck Babson at “Siren City” confab.
The effort began after the siren issue kept coming up at meetings of a mayor’s Perception Task Force in 2014, Fontana said.
One first step was to negotiate new protocols for when fire units accompany ambulances on 911 calls. The city stopped sending the fire crews to doctors’ offices where a call has come in that basically requires transportation to a hospital, he said. The new rule, which took effect in April 2015, affected nine medical office buildings as well as 30 hospital departments and local health clinics. (The fire department will go to some of those lower-priority calls if an ambulance isn’t available for 15 minutes.)
That alone lowered the number of fire department-involved calls by 1,000 this past year, Fontana estimated. Fire engine companies still go to those locations to respond to calls involving cardiac or respiratory arrest, severe respiratory distress, unresponsive patients, and severe trauma (like gunshots, third-degree burns, amputation, or “falls greater than 20 feet”), according to a memo by former NHFD Operations Chief Matthew Marcarelli.
In an interview Monday, city fire union President Frank Ricci said New Haveners are safer because of the general rule of sending fire paramedics to calls. The firefighters arrive promptly and can start giving victims oxygen and check their vitals, so that when the AMR crew arrives on the scene, its paramedics can proceed right into providing care.
Also, Ricci said, “New Haven is basically a three-story city. There is no way for [AMR] paramedics to bring you down the stairs and render care. You need that engine company there. It takes six people to get somebody down the stairs with a monitor on them, oxygen on them. It’s not a two-person job.”
That said, Ricci agreed that it makes sense not to send firefighters anymore to most doctor’s office calls, because trained first responders already work in those offices. He said that firefighters still end up going on some of those calls despite the new rule, because some more 911 dispatch protocols still need fine-tuning.
AMR Repositions
Ambulance crew at a nursing home call.
Meanwhile, AMR has reexamined where it positions its ambulances around town. It doesn’t keep the ambulances at a central locations; based on reviews of service calls, it chooses locations where the ambulances will be closest to the most likely destinations they’ll be sent. After receiving complaints like Ryan Knox’s, AMR has been able to find equally useful locations to station ambulances a few blocks away from the densest residential blocks.
AMR is gradually reducing how much of its fleet runs on diesel engines, which also helps reduce noise, Babson said.
Chief John Alston Jr. with Ryan Knox.
Fontana and Fire Chief Alston said it may be possible to have firefighters delay turning on sirens at the beginning of some lower-priority calls. That matter is now under review.
Fontana added that the city is in the process of purchasing a new paramedic ambulance for the fire department. The department currently has two; the new one, based at Dixwell’s Goffe Street station, will lessen the routes that they need to travel, sirens blaring, to calls.
Win Davis, executive director of the Town Green Special Services District, has participated in the Perception Task Force meetings. He credited city CAO Carter with making progress in response to he public’s concerns. “My office is on the seventh floor of 900 Chapel. Since we started talking about this issue with the city, I hear fewer sirens,” Davis said in an interview.
Knox is less impressed. In his ten years living downtown, he said following the meeting at City Hall, he has noticed the noise getting worse over the past two years, “an explosion of noise, mostly ambulance and fire engine air horns. I don’t remember all the fire trucks attempting to barrel through downtown, clear intersections and take tight corners. I know for a fact people are moving out of downtown because of it, and when it comes to trying to get people to come in, it isn’t panhandling, or meters, or crime. It is sirens that gets mentioned most often.”
Knox said he appreciated that city officials “took the time to meet with me” to discuss solutions. He said he feels the city should hold a public hearing on the subject and reconsider the “logic of sending all that fire equipment and mass, and then billing the taxpayer. I think there should be some proportionality to EMT responses — we don’t send in SWAT teams and paratroopers just to save time for example, so I wonder what the trade-off is between a sustained quality of life and the need to shave off one minute to a call.”
Fontana said the search for more ways to reduce noise will continue, but sirens remain a fact of life in a city with two major hospitals. “The bottom line is we’re trying to do as best as we can to provide the highest level of emergency care at the lowest noise level possible,” Fontana said. “Unfortunately, when you’re going on an emergency call, you need to move vehicles out of the way, and you have to use a siren to do that.”
Years ago I was told by a YNHH nurse that ambulances were not supposed to use their sirens on side streets - like Dwight - but you can regularly observe them doing that day and night. It is piercing and disruptive inside dwellings, not just outside.
As for the downtown, it is an ongoing cacaphony of sirens and motorcycles with deliberately busted mufflers. How hard is it for the NHPD to ticket some of their bros and make them fix their mufflers?
Loud sounds are documented to cause stress.
This is a public health issue, not just a public relations one.