Northborough Fire Chief Parenti is a self-proclaimed ‘data geek’

By Melanie Petrucci, Senior Community Reporter

Northborough – Ever wonder what Fire Chief David Parenti does when he isn’t out helping put out fires?  He can be found in his office, in front of his computer screens (he has two, plus a tablet) crunching data.

Parenti said that while they have been “busy as heck” with calls this summer and, since the new fire station is in process in the Town Manager’s office, he has been spending a good deal of his time on a new project which entails mapping incidents and logging them into computer programs.

“Google has this really cool thing called ‘My Google Maps’ and if you know how to export and import data there is a lot of stuff you can do with it,” he explained.

He gave an example where he plotted all of August’s fire incidents thus far (as of Aug. 8) and their corresponding response times. This allows him to see how long it takes the department to respond to a call from dispatch to on-scene. The matrices he looks at include chute time, which is the time from dispatch to out the door, and response time, which includes chute time plus the time it takes from the station door to the scene of the incident.

“I use all this data so when the Board of Selectmen asks, ‘what do you need, how are things going? Do you need more ambulances; do you need more people?’ I can share this information with them,” Parenti said.

The map indicates where they make the most calls. The data is especially useful when new businesses are thinking of moving into town.

“I look at these and say what kind of impact will these businesses have? This allows me to share with the board or whoever wants to know what kind of impact a new business is going to have on our services,” Parenti remarked. “I have a program that I use from Firehouse Software that I’ve used for almost 20 years now and it’s our records management system. We can extract so much data….”

The Firehouse Software program, working in conjunction with My Google Maps, also allows him to see what kinds of problems there are in the community. For instance, he might see that there have been a lot of falls by seniors so he could call the Senior Center to initiate a fall prevention program.

He said that in 2019 everything is data-driven and he has the data to back up what resources his department needs and why.

“I’m a data geek, but I’m an accurate data geek,” Parenti explained. “Response times are critical items for us to look at, chute times are critical, where we are spending a lot of time such as what is our on-scene time and what is our turnaround time at the hospital. Can we improve that? All of these things we need to look at to improve our service to the people.”