MURRIETA FIRE & RESCUE

operations; establishing rotary wing air attack operations; and assigning a dedicated safety officer.

• The very high risk ERF, with 53 firefighters and officers, is capable of: maintaining unified command, providing water shuttle operations, ground and air (fixed-wing and rotary) fire attack,perimetercontrol,coordinateevacuationofat-riskpersonsandanimals,andstructure defense. All operations described above are based on agency standard operating guidelines established in the agency’s Operations Manual and Wildland Protection Agreement operationalplan.

Causal Factors for Performance Gaps

MFR has identified gaps by comparing actual performance (baselines) to response time goals (benchmarks).Theagency’sinvestigationofthegapshasidentifiedcausalfactors.

• Alarm handling time is extended due to inadequate fire dispatcher training. Murrieta dispatchers have acknowledged this, and to their credit, are requesting additional fire and medicalservicesdispatchtraining.

• Overall total response time is extended due to a lack of a comprehensive automatic aid agreementwithCALFire,whichprovidesfireprotectiontoallareasborderingMurrieta.Tobe mosteffective,thenewagreementshouldincorporateCAD-to-CADcommunicationsbetween dispatch centers and utilize AVL technology to ensure dispatching of the closest units to a wildlandfire.

• ERF total response and travel times are extended due to a failure to initially dispatch an adequatenumberofunitstoeffectivelymitigateanincidentbasedonnatureandrisklevel.

• First-dueandERFtraveltimesareextendedduetoincreasedtrafficcongestion.

Actions

IdentifyingthecausalfactorsforperformancegapsassistsMFRpersonnelinidentifyingpriorities for performance improvement. The agency is taking the following actions to reduce the alarm handlinggapof27seconds

• MFR’s data analyst monitors alarm handling performance of medical incidents on a weekly basisandforwardsthesetocommandstaff.

• The data analyst forwards to the communications battalion chief the incident numbers of incidentswithalarmhandlingtimesthatexceedtheupperoutlier,asestablishedinMFR’sdata outlierpolicy.Thepurposeofthisistoidentifyextraordinarysituationsthatmayhavebeen beyond a dispatcher’s control to performance issues requiring corrective action and/or remedialtraining.