First responders rush through the streets to save lives every day, but that comes with a risk and, sometimes, a cost. With more than 30 crashes involving Jacksonville police and fire vehicles last week, city leaders are once again concerned about safety. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office alone had 24 crashes last week, with the officers at fault in 17 of them.
- PUB DATE: 10/31/2019 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: WJXT-TV CBS 4 Jacksonville

Ever wonder how fire agencies decide who and when to evacuate? It's not a decision made on a hunch. It requires making sense of huge amounts of real-time data and intelligence, and getting it wrong or late can have tragic consequences. Not than long ago, fatalities in California's wildfires were very rare.
- PUB DATE: 10/31/2019 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: LAist

If you have a heart attack in Harlowe, according to resident and former firefighter Rufus Carter, you are in serious trouble: it’s going to take the ambulance an average of 18 minutes and 22 seconds to get there. If you live in nearby Adams Creek, the response time is even longer. That’s the longest average response time for EMS in the county by nine and a half minutes (in Fort Barnwell) and nearly 11 minutes longer than the county’s quickest (Township 7).
- PUB DATE: 10/31/2019 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: New Bern Sun Journal

Chicago has the largest number of women fighting fires and working on ambulances of any city in the country, the city’s fire commissioner said Wednesday, but they make up less than 10% of the department’s total personnel. In a department that has long dealt with diversity issues, aldermen also pressed Chicago Fire Department officials to better address the under-representation of black and Latino firefighters on the force, an annual complaint when officials come to City Hall for their budget hearing.
- PUB DATE: 10/31/2019 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Chicago Tribune - Metered Site

The California wildfires and PG&E’s incompetence are having a terrifying impact on the residents of California, who face not only immense risk to life and property, but a growing number of power and telecom-related outages that make a bad problem worse. There are more than a dozen wildfires currently raging across California, and heavy winds this week are only expected to exacerbate the problem.
- PUB DATE: 10/31/2019 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Vice