EAST POINT, Ga. — Even before East Point laid off 48 firefighters and closed two of its five fire stations this summer, the city routinely failed to meet national standards for timely responses to fire and medical emergency calls.

When City Council members voted to make the cuts, they apparently had no idea that their emergency responses had fallen short of national standards for years.

"That information was never given to the council," said Earnestine Pittman, one of the majority council members voting 7-1 to close the two stations. "It concerns me greatly."

In the first six months of 2008, East Point met the national response standard of six minutes on just 38 percent of the calls, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of city records.

City officials say they have stepped up monitoring of the fire department's performance since the closing of the stations June 30. But fire Chief Rosemary Cloud said the department does not yet know whether the layoffs have affected response times. "We haven't had enough time to make that determination," she said.

The National Fire Protection Association calls on fire departments to respond within six minutes to a fire or medical emergency call at least 90 percent of the time. The standard allows a minute for a 911 dispatcher to take the call, another minute for firefighters to suit up and four minutes for the first unit to arrive.

In each of the past three full years, East Point has never managed to answer more than 40 percent of its emergency calls within the national response time standard, the Journal-Constitution found.

Some individual records suggest unusually long waits for service.

The fire department took more than 15 minutes after a 911 call came in to arrive at the scene of a vehicle fire in May.

The incident was less than a mile from the responding fire station, and there were no other emergencies pending at the time, city records show.

In June, it took 19 minutes from the time of the 911 call to respond to a medical emergency taking place at a house just over a mile away from the nearest station.

Deputy fire Chief William Ware called such lengthy response times "totally inappropriate."

"The concerns that you have raised have not gone unnoticed," Ware said in an interview. "We are in the process of addressing them."

City officials said managers at three levels are now tracking response times. The city also plans to obtain the tools to conduct a more sophisticated analysis of its dispatch records.

Cloud and Ware said they are committed to protecting East Point residents.

"We are striving to be a first-class city in service delivery," Ware said. "Anything less than that is not acceptable."

The national standards are based on the window of time available to keep fires and medical emergencies from turning into tragedies.

"If someone's home is on fire, the difference between a five-minute response and a 15-minute response can absolutely be devastating, not only as far as property value, but most importantly the life hazard," said Lyn Pardue, executive director of the Georgia Firefighter Standards and Training Council.

The National Fire Protection Association does not track how well fire departments across the nation do at meeting the standards. Fire chiefs in some similarly sized departments in metro Atlanta, including Hapeville and Decatur, said the standard is reasonable, and they generally meet or exceed it. The city of Marietta's response data shows it meets the standard about 70 percent of the time.

In East Point, the city's top fire officials have reviewed reports of the city's average response times. But those reports don't shed light on compliance with the national standards.

The Journal-Constitution obtained the city's emergency response records from January 2005 through June 18, 2008, through the Georgia Open Records Act.

The city closed the stations at the end of June and eliminated 49 positions, 48 of them firefighters, to save $3.7 million a year. The action was taken to address a $5 million deficit in the city's budget.

The actual savings will be reduced, however, because East Point must eventually repay about $1 million in federal grant money the city received to bolster the fire department.

East Point city officials said they did study the fire operations before recommending the major cuts and briefed the City Council.

Cloud prepared a presentation warning of serious consequences if the stations were closed — including response times as long as 15 minutes in some parts of the city.

The estimated times were based on test runs conducted by the fire department during one day in June, not on an analysis of actual responses. The chief's presentation was not presented to the council, but Cloud said she did discuss response times with the city manager's office.

Greg Clay, an assistant to the city manager, said his office focused on making sure that the remaining fire stations would be situated so that speedy response times would result.

Cloud said the day the cuts were made was "one of the worst days we ever had to go through, but it was necessary and we are moving forward and we are able to protect the city."

Copyright 2008 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution