One month after the city decommissioned one of its seven fire engines, the city’s firefighters said the amount of time it takes the Fire Department to respond to calls has jumped significantly, with firefighters saying it takes more than six minutes to arrive at a fire in one out of every eight calls.

Mayor David Cohen strongly denies the allegations, accusing firefighters of cherry-picking non-analogous examples and blaming human error on the way response time data is recorded by the city’s record-keeping applications.

In a report on fire response times published by the Boston Globe in February, Newton ranked among the best in MetroWest, responding to 99.3 percent of all fire calls within six minutes of a dispatcher receiving the call. Allowing two minutes for the time a dispatcher receives the call to when a truck leaves a fire station, the National Fire Protection Association standard calls for the first truck to arrive at the scene of a fire in six minutes or less 90 percent of the time.

For full story, visit: Firefighters blame loss of Engine 6