Statistics

Here are some statistics on our run volumes, call types for the year 2005 and some comparisons to previous years.

What we hoped was going to be a downward trend in emergency responses during 2003 and 2004, has continued on its upward march. We note that the wet summers of 2003 and 2004 showed a substantial drop in grass, brush and bush fire responses. The forest was just too damp to catch fire. However, that changed this year and we were back running these types of calls.

After two years of varying percentages in call types, 2005 has shown our calls based upon call types as a percentage of the total return more to "normal." Fires involving structures are down slightly in 2005 to 5 percent, which is a good thing. However, our calls to burning complaints now make up 11 percent of our runs. It is interesting to note that responses to incidents involving automobiles, whether accidents (MVC) or vehicle fires sits at 16 percent. False alarms have also returned to the mid 20 percent. The lowest we've seen has been 18 percent. Unfortunately when we look closer at the false alarm category, we find that over half of our false alarms come from responses to to vehicle incidents that turn out to be unfounded.

Again for 2005 our calls predominantly occurred during the waking hours of the day., and substantially reduced during the nighttime hours. And this makes sense as people are awake and active during these times and it's people who cause our emergencies to happen. It is curious that the majority of our calls to burning complaints occur after normal business hours during the period from 4 p.m. to midnight.

	08:00-15:59	16:00-23:59	24:00-07:59	Total
Structure Fires	9	5	0	14
Bush	0	0	1	1
Brush or Grass Fire	7	14	2	23
Chimney Fires	2	2	2	6
C.O. Alarms	10	8	1	19
MVC	17	11	4	32
Vehicle Fire	7	5	0	12
Hydro	6	9	2	17
False Alarm	32	19	15	66
Rescue	5	1	1	7
Burning Complaint	9	18	3	30
Garbage Fire	2	1	1	4
Assist	6	5	2	13
Other	12	16	3	31
Total Calls	124	114	37	275

As in most years we're the busiest in the last three quarters of the year. We're usually slow in the first quarter, climbs drastically in the second quarter and then tapers down going into the fourth. This corresponds to the good weather periods when more people get involved in outside activities and more visitors flock to this region for their cottages and vacations. This year's climb in the second quarter and fall in the fourth quarter was most pronounced. This year was an another extremely good example of the trend that we have noticed over the past 20 years. Unfortunately this trend also corresponds to when our personnel are the busiest at their places of work. This puts a substantial strain on our resources to deal with emergencies during the second and third quarters.