6 Comments

  • Maybe those laws or ordinances exist somewhere (the article doesn’t cite any), but I highly doubt they are a nationwide problem for municipalities. I am a career firefighter/paramedic for a mid-sized city and a member of the IAFF local. I can assure you there is no widespread, organized fire union agenda to push for fire units to respond to unnecessary calls to look busy — we are busy enough working incidents/calls where our presence is useful and not wasted.

    I’m disappointed the linked post gives people the false perception that firefighters are only there for fires and if you see us at calls or incidents non-fire related it’s just to look busy. The majority of career FFs are trained in multiple disciplines such as EMS, extrication, hazmat, rope rescue, water rescue, etc.

    These days the majority of calls are for EMS and most career FFs are at least EMTs, with a good number trained to the higher paramedic level. In my city, for example, each fire station has at least one paramedic (everyone else is an EMT at minimum) and we carry almost everything the ambulances do (run by a private company) making us just as capable at providing advanced life support as an ambulance crew. We aren’t there just to “accompany” an ambulance.

    This is a common arrangement throughout the nation for EMS not because of laws pushed for by fire unions, but because it’s a good way for municipalities to provide the expected level of timely service to the public with limited budgets and resources.

    No doubt there is waste and unnecessary expenses in the professional fire service and some fire unions may try to advance agendas not in the best interest of tax payers’ money, but it’s not an epidemic. You’ll find the same (and I’d wager worse and more pressing) in any other public service career where unions are involved.

    I’m just bothered that we’re taking jabs from people who don’t seem to understand the professional fire service nor our capabilities and jump to conclusions using a couple of graphs or pie charts that don’t explain anything because there’s no context to go with them.

    • it’s been interesting watching this graph go the rounds with each blog adding their own gloss of interpretation.

      If you think about it, what many of the commenters and blog authors are saying is essentially this:
      If a fire station that had 4 people per shift and dealt with 4 fires per year, it should be cut to 2 people per shift if the number of fires reduces to 2 per year.

      Left unaccounted for are the following factors:
      • Total number of firefighters is largely unchanged, there is a shift to career from volunteer. (There may be many reasons for this, but I think it is driven by property insurance rates being lower (for both taxpayers and municipalities) where the fire protection scores a higher rating, requiring lots of training hours for the specialized equipment.)
      • the population served by the unchanged number of firefighters is increasing
      • having stations with fire personnel and apparatus within reasonable response time of exurban sprawl will necessarily take more stations and personnel than the denser sorts of development in older neighborhoods.

      • “Total number of firefighters is largely unchanged, there is a shift to career from volunteer.”

        Do you have any evidence to support the notions that the graph did not count volunteer fire fighters and / or that the total number of firefighters has not increased?

        ” the population served by the unchanged number of firefighters is increasing”

        So what? How does increased population require more firefighters need to increase due to population when the total number of fires declines?

        “Having stations with fire personnel and apparatus within reasonable response time of exurban sprawl will necessarily take more stations”

        No, that is not necessarily true. There are more ways to decrease response time than just adding more stations.

        • Sorry MattS, my reply to you somehow got stuck on the post from gitarcarver

  • Douglas,

    If you think about it, what many of the commenters and blog authors are saying is essentially this:
    If a fire station that had 4 people per shift and dealt with 4 fires per year, it should be cut to 2 people per shift if the number of fires reduces to 2 per year.

    From what I have seen, I don;t think that is the case.

    What I have seen (and have witnessed at City government meetings in my berg,) is people questioning the use of trucks and other equipment.

    Is there a need for a full truck with four people on that truck to respond to every EMS call in addition to a crew of two EMT’s?

    My little berg just bought a new fire truck for $800,0000. The reason for the purchase was that the unit it was replacing was reaching the end of its life – a life that is determined by hours of use and not by miles traveled or age of the vehicle.

    In a presentation on the need of the new truck, the Fire Chief said that the truck had responded X number of times. When someone asked him the number of times the truck had responded to accompany the EMT’s in their vehicle, it was roughly 75% of the calls.

    What made things worse was that because our little berg serves as a training ground for “Class 1” personnel, we were actually rolling TWO trucks for every medical call because of Florida certification requirements for the department.

    The number of calls was given as the number of times the medical unit headed out PLUS the number of times the fire units went out. A single call resulted in TWO calls on the record.

    When you start using equipment that much with no discernible benefit and increased costs, I believe that it is right and just to look at the numbers and see how stations and departments are staffed as well as how the equipment is used.

    • The data is straight from the NFPA. The NFPA has two broad classifications of firefighters: “Career” and “Volunteer”. The legend on the Mark Perry graph linked by Coyote is “Career Firefighers”, and also uses the same NFPA data:

      In 1984 there were 1,129,350 total firegighters in the USA, 231,600 Career and 897,750 volunteer.
      In 2012 there were 1,129,250 total firefighters in the USA, 345,950 Career and 783,300 volunteer.

      In an example of “you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish” the ISO PPC ratings (or similar) of local fire protection are part of what determines the fire insurance rates that you pay (and your municipality pays for it’s own buildings). Changes made to the ratings classification schedule will typically end up leading to changes in equipment or training of the fire department, because voters tend to get restive if their fire insurance cost spikes for no reason that they can discern. So if the ISO Fire Suppression Rating Schedule (FSRS) says that your sort of built-up area needs every structure within the protection area to be within 1.5 road miles, a new housing development may “require” a new station from either distance or number of structures grounds.

      More population means more housing units, more housing units mean higher density development and/or more structures. Either way that leads to more fire-stations…
      https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ETOTALUSQ176N