Where Are The FLIPPIN' NUMBERS?!?

Intuitively, just listening to my scanner, I can tell you there is a difference in response times since Kansas City's EMS was taken over by the Kansas City Fire Department--and it's not a difference of the good kind. Because I live in South KC, I can tell you that this area has suffered at times for lack of a post in the west south of 95th Street. I was assuming that there would be an ambulance at 99th and Holmes but it seems that ambulance is frequently pulled north, leaving all the southland for the ambulance at Hillcrest and Red Bridge, and dynamic ambulances don't seem to be circulating very quickly. I write this only because I have noticed it anecdotally--I don't have numbers. Apparently, there are some real difficulties north of the river. Today, Tony of TKC blogged on the MAST/KCFD take over and noted that in an upcoming report that he describes as a "city hall report," response time goals have been met only 60% of the time up in the Northland, as opposed to 82% before the take over. He also noted that ambulance shifts have gone unfilled, operations have suffered due to fire department inexperience with EMS, and morale is low.

What does an average person have to do to get those response time numbers on that "city hall report"? In this day and age of the internet, there is no excuse for this information not being on the web. EMS has been run by the KCFD since May 1--that gives two, almost three months of response data under the new regime. I can find none of it. None on KCMO's web site. None by search engine. None. Bupkis. Nada. Zippiddy do. (You got ideas about where to find the info? Share in the comment section please. If that's too public, give a point of contact and I'll get back to you.)

Is this going to require a big effort on my part, using words like "Freedom of Information Act" and lots of e-mails and phone calls? It shouldn't, really, it should not be hard for a citizen who has a life (i.e. not all day to bug the fools down at city hall) to find out how their EMS is doing with number of calls, response times, and other important data.

As to the (apparently) less than impressive results thus far for KCFD EMS, well, I am not surprised. With regard to the pension problems, well, I told you that would be a problem.

Photo: Cell phone pic of pumper and ambulance at a call at Blue Ridge Boulevard and Holmes.

P.S. Not only do I want to know response times and stuff like that related to performance, I want to know are we putting the same number of ambulances out at a given time of day that were out when it was MAST? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that during peak times, there are fewer ambulances then under MAST and at non-peak times there are more ambulances than under MAST. The system is just not as flexible as it was...