Firefighters arrived to LPS fire in just over three minutes

In all of the massive coverage of the Lincoln Public Schools fire, I couldn’t find any story that said how fast firefighters arrived on the scene of the fire that destroyed Lincoln’s school headquarters.

So I asked Interim Fire Chief John Huff about it. He responded today, saying,

According to our incident records, the incident was dispatched at 11:05:47. The first arriving unit was E9 which arrived at 11:08:59.

Lincoln Fire & Rescue’s goal is to arrive on the scene within four minutes 90 percent of the time, but last year at this time, the fire department was not consistently hitting that mark. They were only making it 63 percent of the time. Former Fire Chief Niles Ford said at the time that they were still analyzing the data and trying to figure out why response times had dropped significantly.

We really never heard much more about this — which is really a big deal if you think about it. It’s a good thing firefighters made it to the LPS fire within that target range.