The situation led to Wailupe emergency responders operating out of an SUV and partnering with a private ambulance operated by American Medical Response on every emergency call Tuesday.

Officials with Honolulu’s Emergency Medical Services tell us it’s the first time they’ve been in this situation.

With EMS getting an average of 220 911 calls a day, is the department still capable of responding to emergencies?

A spokesperson says yes.

"I think the board is paying attention and the message is consistently the same," Whitfield said. "The board is monitoring response times in the city of Buffalo. We have no report of negative outcomes for clinical care for any patients in the city of Buffalo, and that's a good thing."

A News 4 Investigates analysis of 2015 calls shows that Rural Metro response times appeared to be getting worse for the most serious calls in the second half of the year.

In Jan-June, there were 1003 calls for cardiac arrest or chest pain. Of those 243 or 24 percent had response times longer than the required 8 min 59 seconds; 40 waited 15 minutes or longer.

In July-Dec, there were 1067 calls for cardiac or chest pains. Of those, 322 or 30 percent had response times longer than the required 8 min, 59 seconds; 50 waited 15 minutes or later.

Mike Addario, Rural Metro's vice president of operations, said new tracking technologies will soon be operational, and that more EMT's and Paramedics will be added to help with response times.

One response to these bigger fires is to build bigger, faster firefighting tools. And last week, a young Colorado Springs-based company called Global SuperTanker Services debuted the biggest, fastest one yet: a converted Boeing 747-400 equipped with a tank that can hold 19,600 gallons of fire retardant—nearly double the size of the tank in the next largest airtanker. The plane, named the Spirit of John Muir, can cruise at speeds up to 600 miles per hour for as far as 4,000 nautical miles and get to any fire in the western U.S. in a few hours.

The aircraft, which cost more than $10 million to purchase and outfit, made its first successful test drop in early May in Arizona, then conducted a flyby performance in front of crowds last week in Colorado Springs. It’s expected to receive certification soon and begin operation in the field by late June. It's a larger, modernized version of a plane originally designed by Oregon’s now-defunct Evergreen Aviation. (Global SuperTanker Services purchased the old plane’s patents, systems, and certificates.) “People are living closer and closer to forested areas and now a fire that would have burned itself out years ago will burn a thousand homes,” says Jim Wheeler, president and CEO of Global SuperTanker Services, which has been working on the airtanker since September. “There’s now an even bigger need to arrest these fires.”

Sounds impressive. But there's no guarantee it'll do much to reduce the threat of wildfires near urban areas.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and the co-director of the Association for Fire Ecology, says that chemical retardants—which are designed to slow the rate of fire spread, not extinguish it— aren't very ecologically friendly, and not that effective on large, raging burns. Plus they're wildly expensive to drop from an airplane.