Hi Highlander, I've been in the fire service for 25 years and what happens in our emergency service (at least up to now) is that while the control operator is talking on the phone, they have already pressed the required buttons on their computer to turn out the nearest fire appliance to the incident address. They still however keep the caller on the phone to try to get as much information about the incident as they can possibly gleen to aid the crews who are en route, things like;
Where the fire is
Are there people in the house/building
Which room are the people in (if known or seen at a window)
If it's a car crash, how many vehicles, and if poss how many casualties
If someone trapped somewhere ie in machinery at work etc. are they conscious and breathing.
As I said, the fire engines are already en route while this is going on and the control operator passes the information gathered by radio to the crews.
Now that is because we don't prioritise calls, every call gets a full attendance to the particular incident type without delay. The ambulance service however, because of cuts and more cuts, DO prioritise calls and they ask a million questions because they want to know what type of ambulance to send, and at what point on the call list your particular will end up.
At the moment, the fire service is going through a similar round of massive cuts on top of more cuts that have happened in the past, so it will not be too long before we see the same sort of thing happening with fire engines as you saw with that ambulance.
Sad really, but successive governments have been quite happy to cut these vital services because of the deficit caused by the greedy corporate money grabbing people and of course the greedy banks.
Oh, and they don't call them cuts, they call them "efficiency savings".
