Since the removal of career firefighters from Greenbelt on June 30, 2024, the Greenbelt community worried about longer response times and reduced service provided to the community. At the time of the announcement, Prince George’s County Fire Department (PGFD) Chief Tiffany Green estimated the average response time would be around eight minutes. Before the staffing reallocation plan the average response time in Greenbelt had been close to four minutes (see the June 13, 2024, News Review issue). In a series of letters sent to Mayor Emmett Jordan, Green has provided updates on the state of fire and EMS service in the Greenbelt area.
Increasing Average
Response Times
The average response time for all types of calls from June 30, 2024, through December 28, 2024, sat at just under six minutes according to the January 3, 2025, letter. The time period encapsulates the early portion of the “staffing relocation plan.” The latest update from Green reports the average response time for any type of call has increased to six minutes and 25 seconds from June 30, 2024, through April 26, 2025. That’s nearly an eight percent increase from the January 3 update. (Editor’s note: This increase does not reflect the times for the most recent month compared to previous months, but rather the average calculated over the first six months compared to an average calculated for a ten-month period (including that first six months in calculations of a new average). In this way, each new average provided by PGFD is for cumulative months, thus an average calculated over an increasingly large number of data points.)
Fire and Rescue Response
While most of the response times across different call types have fluctuated during the four 2025 updates, two categories ‒ fire response and rescue response ‒ have steadily increased throughout the timeline of reports. The first report analyzing response time data between June 30, 2024, and December 28, 2024, reported the average response time of fire calls at four minutes and five seconds. That time increased by 10 seconds in Green’s January 31 update and escalated to four minutes and 21 seconds in her March 14 letter. The latest update containing data from June 30, 2024, through April 26, 2025, registers the average response time of fire-related calls at four minutes and 47 seconds with a total of 438 fire calls through April 26. Since the first report on January 3, 2025, the average response time to these specific calls has increased by 42 seconds. The average response time for rescue calls also steadily increased since the initial period of June 30, 2024, through December 28, 2024. In the January 3, 2025, report Green wrote that the average response time to those types of calls was four minutes and 36 seconds using data from June 30, 2024, through December 28, 2024. In the latest report sent on May 2, the average response time increased to five minutes and 26 seconds, according to data between June 30, 2024, through April 26, 2025. It’s an increase of about 18 percent, although it should be noted that the number of rescue calls increased by close to 42 percent over that time.
Who’s Responding
In Green’s May 2 update letter, there were a total of 3,338 responses in Greenbelt Fire Station’s first due area from stations all throughout Prince George’s County from June 30, 2024, through April 26, 2025. The station that responded to the majority of calls in the area was Berwyn Heights Station 814, which responded to over 26 percent of calls in the area (880 of the 3,338), increasing its number of responses by 140 from June 30, 2023, through April 26, 2024. In addition to Berwyn Heights’ increased response in the area, West Lanham Hills Fire Station and National Harbor Station responded to 17 percent and 13.4 percent of calls respectively; in the area from June 30, 2024, through April 26, 2025. Greenbelt Station 835 responded to 2.6 percent of calls during that stretch of time, a total of 86 responses out of the total 3,338 responses. By contrast, prior to the reallocation of career firefighters, from June 30, 2023, through April 26, 2024, Station 835 responded to the majority of calls in the area, responding 1,364 times out of a total 3,546 responses.
Ryan Colasanti is a student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism interning with the Greenbelt News Review.
