Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WNYC, it's Tuesday, April 15th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill.

Michael Hill: Rain showers, scattered thunderstorms, and strong winds are brewing for the New York City area tonight. The National Weather Service says the storms likely won't be severe, but they could bring some small hail and gusts of up to 35 mph. The turbulent weather will set up a cooler day for tomorrow, with highs only expected to hit the low 50s. Meteorologist Jim Connolly says the region will see a significant change come Saturday.

Jim Connolly: We really start to see warm up [unintelligible 00:00:50]. There is a chance of showers, but we have high temperatures in the 70s.

Michael Hill: Average highs for this time of year hover around 62 degrees, but meteorologists say fluctuating temperatures are normal for spring. The shows will go on at Forest Hill Stadium this summer after a high-profile permit standoff was resolved. WNYC's Julia Heywood has more on how a fight over private streets, race, and noise nearly derailed the entire concert season.

Julia Heywood: Queensborough President Donovan Richards says the deal allows the NYPD to issue sound permits for the stadium's summer concert series. It comes after weeks of tense back-and-forth with the Forest Hills Garden Corporation, which is a private group that had blocked police access to the streets around the venue. Richards previously accused the group of racism for trying to shut down shows he says reflect the diversity of Queens. As part of the new agreement, concert organizers will now use private security to manage crowds on those streets.

Michael Hill: Back to that forecast. 64 and partly cloudy. Chances of afternoon showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy. 66 for a high, windy, and gusty. Then tonight, stormy chances of showers and storms, low in the low 40s. Gusty, mostly cloudy. Cooler tomorrow at 53.

Janae Pierre: Stay close. There's more after the break.

Michael Hill: It's hard to imagine a New York City soundscape that doesn't involve, at least in the distance, this sound.

[sirens wail]

Michael Hill: The sound of sirens is as much a part of the city as honking horns, subway squeals, and the flap of pigeon wings. What if they don't need to be quite so everywhere? A new podcast examines how we came to use sirens on all our emergency vehicles and finds they might actually endanger more people than they help. Ben Naddaff-Hafrey is a senior producer, writer, and frequent co-host of the podcast Revisionist History with writer Malcolm Gladwell. He also lives across the street from a fire station in Brooklyn. Ben joins us now. Hi, Ben.

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey: Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me on to start.

Michael Hill: To start with the obvious, we all assume emergency vehicles need to get to places quickly. You say those sirens don't actually save that much time.

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey: Right. This is the big thing. There are a few assumptions on which the use of sirens rests. One is that every emergency is an urgent situation. The second is that sirens save a lot of time for first responders when they are responding to those emergencies. It turns out that both of those assumptions are a little more complicated than they initially appear. There have been a number of studies into how much time license sirens on an ambulance actually saves in the average run. It turns out the answer is about 42 seconds to 3 minutes and 48 seconds on average.

Basically, there's a number of paramedics especially and EMS medical directors who have looked at this question because using sirens is not only loud and louder for first responders than for pedestrians, but it actually entails a lot of risk. If you drive with your lights and sirens running, you are increasing the risk of an accident by over 50% en route to a scene. It's even higher than that if you're driving back from a scene. Either way, this is a real driver of ambulance accidents. Again, maybe you think, "We should tolerate this because it's getting people to the scene of emergencies faster." That does often seem to be the case.

If you look at the actual data, and I'm thinking of one study in particular from 2020 by the chief medical officer, who's EMS medical director in the Fort Worth, Texas area, named Jeff Jarvis. He looked at a data set of all 911 calls in this data set in 2018. It was close to 6 million calls. These were to ambulances. He found that 85.8% of responses involved the use of lights and sirens. Then, he and his team looked at how many times did those responses lead to even vaguely potentially lifesaving interventions. The answer was 6.9%. There's this radical overestimation of how urgent most situations are. Even the lifesaving situations might not be time-sensitive.

Michael Hill: There are people who will be listening to this, Ben, and say, "Surely there are some situations where even a minute could make a difference." I'm talking in terms of people suffering a heart attack or a gunshot victim.

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey: Yes, it is very much the case that if you are suffering from a heart attack, seconds make a difference. Yes, you should run lights and sirens, even if it's risky, even if it is saving you 42 seconds at most. If you look at what percentage of that data set of millions of 911 calls in 2018 were for heart attacks, it's right around 1%. This is consistent with what another major siren researcher, his name is Douglas Kupas, has told me in an email. The heart attack situation, cardiac arrest, is in many ways the exception to the rule of what paramedics are doing. It's the exception on which the rule is, to a large extent, based.

There are really elaborate, well worked out systems for coding calls as they come into 911 that tell first responders what they're dealing with. These studies, again, have looked at this question of how much do you know from an initial 911 call, and how often are we accurately predicting how urgent something is? It turns out you, in many cases, know enough to make the call about how genuinely urgent a situation is. If it's a heart attack, if it's a gunshot wound, if someone is unconscious, not breathing, if they're choking, you should do everything you can to get there as quickly as possible. Those genuinely emergent situations are the minority of cases. They're not the majority of cases.

Michael Hill: How do first responders feel about the sirens?

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey: It varies. I would say that the sources that I spoke to, researchers, EMS, medical directors, all said they came up in a culture where this was the norm. One of them said to me, "If you'd asked me as an 18-year-old, are lights and sirens always necessary? I would have said yes, but that's because I hadn't done the job yet." I think many of them have this experience of seeing the danger of using them, being the person at risk because they're driving in a way that is dangerous for them and for others. Then getting to the scene of a 911 call and being like, as one of them put it to me, "We just ran through red lights for tooth pain." If it's not a system that needs to be exposing them to that amount of risk, then it's not something that we should want for that community either.

Michael Hill: Ben Naddaff-Hafrey is a producer and occasional co-host of the podcast Revisionist History. Ben, thank you.

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey: Thank you so much, Michael.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More soon.

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