Preparation for Industrial Careers in Mathematics: Analysis of Newport News Fire Department

Abstract

In efforts to improve their overall efficiency, Chief Rogers, our community liaison with the Newport News Fire Department, challenged us to help his staff find more efficient ways to analyze the data regarding their response times to structure fires around the city. Through our partnership with the fire department our group was tasked with analyzing structure fire data from 2013-2018 in order to find a possible connection between fire response times and community factors. In particular, our goal was to characterize the efficiency and effectiveness of the Newport News Fire Department as a whole as well as the individual districts or stations; automate the process of compiling and analyzing the data to help the fire department perform calculations more quickly; and analyze how the development of Tech Center has affected response times as well as how new developments in Newport News will potentially impact the Newport News Fire Department.