Improving the emergency service delivery in St. Albert

This paper summarizes two studies conducted to improve the emergency service delivery in St. Albert, a small city near Edmonton, Alberta. The first study dealt with selecting the location of a new fire station. The goals of the study included an assessment of the performance of the current system, an identification of the area(s) with poor coverage, a selection of a site among a set of given candidate locations, and an assessment of the improvement in the system performance upon the addition of the new fire station. A geographical information system was used for storing and displaying the spatial data, computing service areas for given travel times, and for communicating the results of the study. The second study considered an evaluation of the resources available for emergency service. A probabilistic model was used to evaluate labor costs for different platoon sizes and a simulation model was used to evaluate the adequacy of the current staff and fleet sizes.