NYC NOW - Midday News: Storms Roll Through NYC Area, Forest Hills Stadium Permit Dispute Resolved, and Rethinking Sirens in the City

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Rain, thunderstorms and gusty winds are in the forecast for the New York City area Tuesday night. Meanwhile in Queens, Forest Hills Stadium will move ahead with its summer concert season after resolving a contentious permit fight. Plus, a new podcast explores the surprising dangers of sirens.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Tuesday, April 15th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. Rain shower, scattered thunderstorms, and strong winds are brewing for the New York City area tonight. The National Weather Service says the storms likely won't be severe, but they could bring some small hail and gust of up to 35 miles an hour. The turbulent weather will set up a cool,

cooler day for tomorrow with highs only expected to hit the low 50s, that is. Meteorologists Jim Connolly says the region will see a significant change come Saturday. We really start to warm up. There's a chance of showers, but we have high temperatures in the 70s. Average highs for this time of year hover around 62 degrees, but meteorologists say fluctuating temperatures are normal for spring. The shows will go on at Forest Hill Stadium this summer after a high-profile permit standoff was resolved. Debbie and Mice's Julia Haywood has more on how a fight over private streets, race, and noise, nearly derailed the entire concert season.

Queensboro President Donovan Richards says the deal allows the NYPD to issue sound permits for the stadium's summer concert series. It comes after weeks of tents back and forth with the Forest Hills Garden Corporation, which is a private group that had blocked police access to the streets around the venue. Richards previously accused the group of racism for trying to shut down shows he says reflect the diversity of Queens. As part of the new agreement, concert organizers will now use private security to manage crowds on those streets. Back to that forecast, 64 and partly cloudy chances of afternoon showers and thunderstorms, mostly cloudy 66 for a high, windy and gusty than tonight's storming, chances of showers and storms low in the low 40s at gusty,

Mostly cloudy cooler tomorrow, 53. Stay close. There's more after the break. It's hard to imagine a New York City soundscape that doesn't involve, at least in the distance, this sound. The sound of sirens is as much a part of the city as honking horns, subway squeals, and the flap of pigeon wings. But what if they don't need to be quite so everywhere? A new podcast examines how we came to use sirens on all our emergency vehicles and finds they might actually endanger more people than they help. Ben Nett of Haferry is a senior producer, writer, and frequent co-host of the podcast, Revision Is History, with writer Malcolm Gladwell.

He also lives across the street from a fire station in Brooklyn. Ben joins us now. Hi, Ben. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me on. To start with the obvious, we all assume emergency vehicles need to get to places quickly. But you say those sirens don't actually save that much time. Right. So this is sort of the big thing.

There are a few assumptions on which the use of sirens rest. One is that every emergency is an urgent situation. The second is that sirens save a lot of time for first responders when they are responding to those emergencies. And it turns out that both of those assumptions are a little more complicated than they initially appear. There have been a number of studies into how much time. license sirens on an ambulance actually saves in the average run. And it turns out the answer is about 42 seconds to three minutes and 48 seconds on average. Basically, there's a number of paramedics especially and EMS medical directors who have looked at this question because using sirens is not only loud and louder for first responders than for pedestrians even, but it actually entails a lot of risk.

And if you drive with your lights and sirens running, you are increasing the risk of an accident by over 50% on route to a scene. And it's actually even higher than that if you're driving back from a scene. Either way, this is a real driver of ambulance accidents. But again, maybe you think, well, we should tolerate this because it's getting people to the scene of emergencies faster. And that does often seem to be the case. But if you look at the actual data, and I'm thinking of one study in particular from 2020 by the chief medical officer, who's an sort of EMS medical director in the Fort Worth, Texas area named Jeff Jarvis,

he looked at a data set of all 911 calls in this data set in 2018. It was close to six million calls. These were to ambulances. And he found that 85.8 percent of responses involved the use. of lights and sirens. And then he and his team looked at how many times did those responses lead to even vaguely potentially life-saving interventions? And the answer was 6.9%. And so there's this radical overestimation of how urgent most situations are. And even the life-saving situations might not be time sensitive. You know, there are people who would be listening to this,

Ben and say, surely there are some situations where even a minute could make a difference, right? I'm talking in terms of people suffering a heart attack or a gunshot victim. Yes, it is very much the case that if you are suffering from a heart attack, seconds make a difference. So, yes, you should run lights and sirens, even if it's risky, even if it is saving you 42 seconds at most. But if you look at what percentage of that data set of millions of 911 calls in 2018 actually refer heart attacks, it's right around 1%. And this is consistent with what another major siren researchers, name is Douglas Kupus, has told me in an email that the heart attack situation,

cardiac arrest, is in many ways the exception to the rule of what paramedics are doing. But it's actually the exception on which the rule is, to a large extent, base. There are really elaborate, well-worked-out systems for coding, calls as they come into 911 that tell first responders what they're dealing with. And these studies, again, have sort of looked at this question of how much do you know from an initial 911 call and how often are we accurately predicting how urgent something is. And it turns out you really, in many cases, know enough to make the call about how genuinely urgent a situation is. So if it's a heart attack, if it's a gunshot wound, if someone is unconscious and not breathing, if they're choking,

you should do everything you can to get there as quickly as possible. But those genuinely emergent situations are the minority of cases. They're not the majority of cases. How do first responders feel about the sirens? It varies. I would say the sources that I spoke to, researchers, EMS medical directors, all said they came up in a culture where this was the norm. And one of them said to me, you know, if you'd asked me as an 18-year-old,

are lights and sirens always necessary? I would have said, like, yes, but that's because I hadn't done the job yet. And so I think many of them have this experience of seeing the danger of using them, being the person at risk because they're driving in a way that is dangerous for them and for others, and then getting to the scene of a 911 call and being like, as one of them put it to me, you know, we just ran through red lights for tooth pain. If it's not a system that needs to be exposing them to that amount of risk, then it's not something that we should want for that community either.

Ben, Anna Fafri is a producer and occasional co-host of the podcast Revisionist History. Ben, thank you. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More soon.