San Diego has consistently been ranked as have poor emergency (fire/medical) response times with average response times being somewhere around 10 minutes or so. For a major city, this is pretty awful. We saw this first hand today. We took our dog to Dusty Rhodes park in Ocean Beach (there isn’t a dog park near us) and as we were sitting there, I heard a crash, looked up and saw the tail end of a multi car accident on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Lots of people went over to see if they could help and several dialed 911. The first fire truck didn’t arrive on scene for somewhere around 15 minutes after the accident, then an ambulance arrived more than 5 minutes after that (we saw the ambulance come around the park and it took about 3-4 minutes for it to drive around the park with the traffic). Next, the police arrived maybe 5-10 minutes later. It’s really a good thing that no one had injuries and there wasn’t a fire, because the delayed response could have been disastrous.
Our city (which has no money) is in dire need of more emergency resources. It is a real shame that our politicians create the pension crisis and has put our great city is such a financial mess that we can’t even afford to put more emergency personnel on the street.
On a side note, the accident was a Cadillac Escalade that rear ended a Subaru Forester. The front end damage that the Escalade sustained was severe while there didn’t appear to be much rear end damage on the Subaru; it had its windows shattered and it looked like a non-functioning wheel, but no apparent collapse. I’m not sure how a speeding Escalade that significantly outweighs the Subaru had so much damage.