About the research

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For years, anecdotal evidence had mounted of volunteer shortages in Long Island fire districts, and of rising spending on equipment, facilities and perquisites to attract more firefighters to the service.

But the system defied analysis because no central source of reliable information existed at any level of government, including the fire service itself.

Now, Newsday has compiled the first comprehensive picture of the finances and performance of the fire system in Nassau and Suffolk counties -- the last large public service on Long Island to remain impervious to outside scrutiny. The information will be available in an eight-day series of stories in the newspaper, and in an expanded form online at newsday.com.

Reporter Elizabeth Moore interviewed hundreds of people inside the fire service, along with national leaders and experts. She traveled to California, the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the Bahamas and upstate New York to survey other fire systems and to chronicle the travels of Long Island firefighters to training seminars and equipment expositions.

Moore and researcher Stacey Altherr also examined thousands of documents in gathering material not only for the stories themselves, but for extensive tables and interactive material that are available in the newspaper or online. The series' principal chart, for instance, contains 5,444 facts and figures on spending, emergency-response performance and numerous other issues.

In recent weeks, reporter Tom McGinty and reporter/researcher Eden Laikin joined the project to collect and analyze response times, and researcher MaryEllen Pereira gathered village tax data.

Newsday also hired two independent consultants to review the series' methods for collecting and analyzing data.

The effort to hunt down data throughout the far-flung fire system, and, once it was in hand, to organize and analyze it, was intimidating from the start.

When Newsday began the bulk of its data collection in 2003, even the most fundamental information about system costs, department memberships and the number of residential fires was difficult to locate.

Many fire officials weren't even sure how how many people they protected. So Newsday linked county computer maps to population maps from the U.S. Census. The information was key to comparing the widely disparate cost of fire protection among Long Island's communities, and how the spending stacks up against regional and national averages.

The strong home-rule tradition of New York's fire-service laws vests most responsibility for keeping statistical information with the local fire agencies -- some of them protecting areas as small as one tenth of a square mile.

Moore and Altherr began by sending requests under the Freedom of Information Law to all 179 local fire agencies, seeking data on subjects including budgets, contract costs, pension benefits and training requirements

Subsequent requests sought bidding specifications for vehicle purchases, meeting minutes, fire tax data and receipts from annual fund drives.

In all, Newsday submitted more than 800 individual FOIL requests to government agencies at the state, county, town, village and fire district and department levels. Charitable tax returns filed by fire departments also were requested from the Internal Revenue Service.

In documenting trends in spending, Newsday requested detailed budgets directly from fire districts and departments, along with those they filed with towns and villages. The annual financial reports the fire agencies filed with the state comptroller, detailing debts and fund balances, also were requested.

These records provided crucial insights on the size and scope of the region's fire protection system. But the road map for Newsday's more detailed research came in hundreds of conversations, most of them confidential, with firefighters concerned about about problems they had observed first hand in their own firehouses:

Overspending. Difficulties in attracting volunteers. Uneven, sometimes dangerously slow emergency response. An insular firehouse culture resistant to outside scrutiny.

Perhaps the most fundamental task of any fire department is to get fire and rescue equipment to emergencies as quickly as possible.

To calculate emergency response times for fires and medical calls, Newsday obtained more than half a million dispatch records from county emergency dispatch agencies.

These records, which included more than four years' worth of emergency fire and medical calls, contained the dispatch times for each call and the times that each engine, ambulance or other unit left the firehouse and arrived at the scene.