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t 1996 Emergency Calls The total calls for 1996 increased to 889 from 729 in 1995. This represents an increase of eighteen percent or 160 calls. This is the second year in a row that carbon monoxide alarms contributed to a significant increase. We wrote some articles for our city newsletter to help reduce the carbon monoxide alarm calls but the increase in carbon monoxide detectors more than offset the effect of the articles. We will continue to work on the reduction of false carbon monoxide alarms. It should be noted however, that we did find a number of homes that had a measurable level of carbon monoxide present when we arrived, but no one was sick enough to be treated for carbon monoxide. Another significant area of increase was smell of natural gas calls. There are many reasons for this ranging from dispatching issues to the cold weather early this fall. Each of these areas is continually worked on to bring this issue under control. Medical calls grew slightly probably due to increased population. If you add the chest pains and difficulty breathing calls together, you will get about twenty five percent of the medicals. These two types are related to heart related issues which is very common with our senior citizens. The year of 1996 however, was a year when defibrillators were used very little because we had very few cardiac arrests. There were some major changes made during the year which relate to the way we responded to calls. Some of these changes are as follows: ~ Gas smell calls were changed to be a routine response (no red lights and siren). Carbon monoxide alarms with no sickness were changed to be a routine response (no red lights and siren). All other calls were changed so that only one vehicle uses red lights and siren until the problem is confirmed. These changes were made based on our experiences and an effort to make our work safer for us as well as the citizens of the community. It should also be noted that for several years many of our calls only have one fire vehicle response from a single station. We had four major structure fires during the year were the buildings were a total loss. Of the four, three of these were single family homes and one was a commercial building. Of the four, three of the fires went undetected for some time before the fire department was notified and the other fire is still under investigation. We did respond to several other structure fires where the fires were extinguished quickly and the loss was kept to a minimum. The only injury to a citizen because of a fire was an individual who had a vehicle gas tank explode when repairs were being done to the tank. The injuries in this case were minor. ~ Attached you find a breakdown of our calls for 1996 as well as a comparison to previous years.