Tracking the percentage of fire calls where a needed ladder truck arrives on scene within 5 minutes 20 seconds is crucial for ensuring a quick and effective response to structure fires. Ladder trucks are essential for accessing higher floors, rescuing people, delivering water, and ventilating buildings to control the spread of smoke and fire. Rapid arrival of these trucks can make a significant difference in preventing loss of life and minimizing property damage. By monitoring this performance measure, the City can assess the efficiency of its fire response, including the availability of resources, response times, and overall fire suppression capabilities. This data helps inform decisions on staffing, resource allocation, and training, ensuring that the fire department can meet national safety standards and provide the best possible service to the community.

The response rate has been steady increasing over the past decade with some fluctuation year to year.

Every incident is logged in the Portland Fire and Rescue (PF&R) records management system, along with information on what was dispatched and found at the scene.  This includes the type of responders, the call types, and the time it takes for each responder to arrive. PF&R will look at the important call categories that ladder trucks respond to, whether they responded within four minutes,  and compile a percentage.

Some factors that impact the measure are: Time to leave stations, traffic, distance to the incident, other incidents that PR&R might be responding to, and numbers of available trucks.

Information about call counts, available resources, and other statistics can be found on the PF&R Annual Performance Reports webpage.