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Section Three: Risk Assessment <br /> <br />Water Supply <br /> <br />Eugene Fire & EMS maintains more than 4,000 public fire hydrants, nearly all within the city <br />limits of Eugene. In addition there are several hundred private hydrants checked by department <br />personnel and maintained by the individual occupancies they supply. The volume and pressure <br />of both the public and the private hydrants in the system is excellent. During normal fire ground <br />operations there is typically no problem acquiring and maintaining adequate fire flows. <br />However, this is not true of those portions of the city which lie at higher elevations, particularly <br />the South Hills and Hendricks Park areas, where water is supplied from reservoirs. Further, <br />some areas above these reservoirs are supplied by electric booster pumps, resulting in decreased <br />pressure being available for firefighting operations in these areas. <br /> <br />For the most part, the rural areas served by Eugene Fire & EMS do not have fire hydrants in <br />place. For this reason, the department maintains two water tenders (tank trucks) and several <br />portable pumps to supply water for firefighting purposes in these outlying areas. <br /> <br />Average Area Protected by Initial Response Companies <br /> <br />Eugene Fire & EMS' entire fire and EMS first response area is 72.2 square miles. It is served by <br />ten engine companies and two ladder companies. (Engine//12 is included here, even though it is <br />dedicated to response at the Eugene Airport and not available to respond to incidents off airport <br />property. It does respond to calls for service at the airport.) Therefore the average area covered <br />by each initial response company is six square miles. Generally speaking, when the area <br />protected by fire companies exceeds nine square miles, this would result in unacceptably <br />extended response times. <br /> <br />Types of Calls to Which Eugene Fire & EMS Responds <br /> <br />Response requests are distributed among three main call types - Fire, EMS, and Other - by <br />sorting based on dispatch activity descriptions. These call types are further divided as follows: <br /> <br /> <br />