Care to know the average time it takes for the Los Angeles Fire Department to reach you in the case of an emergency?
Some Los Angeles residents may not feel at ease after taking a look at a new fire response time map courtesy of 2013 Los Angeles mayoral candidate Austin Beutner's campaign.
The LAFD has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for its response times, which are actually slower than were reported by the city and department. The LAFD had been claiming an 86-percent success rate for arriving to emergencies in less than five minutes, but it has since been discovered that the actual rate is about 59 percent.
The national standard is 90 percent.
In an effort to inform Angelenos on the response times, Beutner's campaign created a map, which can be seen below, that identifies average times across the city, station-by-station.
"We wanted to let residents know how their own neighborhood stations respond," a campaign volunteer said. "What we also found was that the response times at individual stations in many neighborhoods is far below the city-wide average."
The map shows response times of less than five minutes for roughly 100 stations all around the city, with some shocking results:
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Fire Station 109 in Encino Hills: 15 percent
Fire Station 108 in Franklin Canyon: 18 percent
Fire Station 40 in Terminal Island: 30 percent
Fire Station 77 in Sun Valley: 35 percent
Other stations were much higher than the city average and closer to the national standard:
Fire Station 11 in Westlake/ MacArthur Park: 80 percent
Fire Station 14 in Newton: 80 percent
Fire Station 9 in Central City: 82 percent
Beutner criticized city officials for response times in his blog, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who he for as First Deputy Mayor until April 2011.
"Why haven't the mayor, the controller and city council done anything about it?" Beutner wrote. "How many more unfortunate tragedies … have to occur before something is done?"
Beutner added that he wants the fire department to provide the public with easy-to-understand statistics and to post them online.
The data used in the map is current as of 2011, the volunteer said.
The department has no comment on the map, an LAFD public information officer said.
View LAFD Response Times Map in a larger map
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