Wednesday, March 5, 2003
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Wednesday, March 5, 2003 |
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Let's properly fund our 1st line of defense By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE A few months after New York City's darkest hour, I caught a news clip of then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani addressing the latest graduates from NYC's public safety academy. It was just a few seconds long, and I spent many hours afterwards searching in vain for a transcript. The gist of his remarks was that the fire service is one of the few careers people seek today out of love for their community. It sure doesn't pay that well. Unless you're on one of those hunky firefighter calendars, there's not much glamour involved. The incidence of job-related injury and mortality is among the highest of any profession. Yet except for reasons ofhealth, it's rare for a veteran firefighter toquit for a civilian job. On a call, you work hard and get dirty. Between calls, you still work hard on equipment, training, and reports. And your emotions go from one extreme to the other, depending on how successful the outcome of your efforts. If you haven't already, you'll soon receive "On Call," the newsletter the Peachtree City Volunteer Firefighters Association occasionally publishes. I hope you'll read the whole thing, but at least, please please read the front and back pages. Things have changed a lot since Dave and I were on the roster, 25-30 years ago. For instance, if we ran five or six calls a week, whew! Boy! What a week this has been. In 2002, PCFD ran 542 fire calls and 1,610 emergency medical service calls a far cry from the 250 or so, total, that we ran per year in the 1970s. In the "olden days," for example, on a residential call, we sent whatever apparatus seemed appropriate and called for more if needed. There was only one fire station in town, and only one paid person to stay there all day. His (or her) job was to make sure equipment was clean and ready. When there was a call he (or she) opened the bay doors, cranked whichever trucks were going to run, and had them on the apron before the volunteers arrived. For all that, we had remarkably quick response times. Today, to meet standards required by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), a fire department should have a minimum of 17-18 people on a residential fire in the first five minutes, whether it turns out to be a smoking frying pan or an inferno through the roof. And today, Peachtree City can't reach the level of response national standards require even if all four stations are emptied which, of course, leaves the city unprotected should another incident occur. It also means that highways and parkways all over Peachtree City are at risk for large trucks responding to a section of town that is not normally theirs to protect. As I've frequently heard around the station, "This is the luckiest d---d city I've ever seen, never to have had a fatality or even a serious injury in an emergency response! It's just a matter of time." And it's just a matter of time, they add, that the city is open to liability for refusing to staff and equip the department up to national standards. While we're on the subject of personnel, the U.S. Fire Administration recently completed a needs-assessment survey of departments nationwide, and reports that the national average for communities the size of Peachtree City is 18.8 firefighters on duty per 24-hour shift. Did I mention that, at present, only 12 and sometimes 11 full-time firefighters (all of whom have EMT or paramedic certification), plus command officers, are available for daytime calls in Peachtree City? But what about volunteers? According to Assistant Chief Ed Eiswerth, the 35-40 volunteers currently serving alongside the career firefighters are the best and best-trained volunteers we've had in years. After six months of "Rookie School," they must take 10 hours of ongoing training a month. Just like the career people. On a recent Saturday, 31 volunteer and career firefighters turned out for training in the new burn building. If you scan the list in On Call's last page, you'll see that this is a well-educated coalition both career and volunteer that boasts doctorates, master's degrees, college degrees, and numerous technical certifications. On any given call, however, Eiswerth says he can't be sure how many volunteers will be available. They have jobs, in Atlanta or in the air, reflecting their education. The paid staffers have part-time jobs or are self-employed between shifts, and cannot leave to help out with a major incident. It's not like it was in "my" day. We had a fraction of the calls today's department answers, most of us worked within the city limits, and we had civic-minded employers who let us leave our jobs to respond. We did well under the circumstances, believe me when I say that. But it was a different world. And even then, there was always an ISO rating dangling before us as an incentive. The Insurance Service Organization has an unbelievably complex point system for determining rates for fire insurance, and I don't intend to try to explain it. As if I could. The short take is to say that the amount you must pay for home, business, or industrial insurance is based on a number, 1 through 10. No fire protection of any kind is Class 10. A rural home with, say, a volunteer fire department 20 minutes away and no hydrants would be lucky to get Class 9. I remember when Peachtree City's ISO rating was Class 9. But as we acquired equipment or rebuilt it (did you know Chief Leach built us a tanker on a school bus chassis?) and as we recruited and trained personnel, and as we added stations in other parts of town, gradually the numbers improved. Why does this matter? Your fire insurance premiums go down as ISO ratings go down. There are only a few Class 1 departments in the nation: Macon/Bibb County is one. Peachtree City has been an ISO Class 4 for several years. Now let's be clear. I'd like to tell you that going to Class 3 our goal ever since we got Class 4 would whack X-dollars from the insurance premiums of a $200,000 house. But the way one insurance company calculates premiums is different from another, and one family's insurance needs differ from another's, hence the cost is not across-the-board consistent. Only your own insurance provider can tell you exactly how much lower your premiums will be. But they very likely will go down. Also, be clear that we're not talking about huge sums of money. Improved ratings tell me more about how much better, quicker, and more effectively the fire department can protect me and my neighbors. I have correspondence between Chief Stony Lohr and Kevin Gimeno of the ISO about a year and a half ago. They'd been going back and forth as to how many points we'd get by bringing equipment and stations into compliance. They'd gone as far as they could go, and still couldn't rate Peachtree City an ISO Class 3 without more people on the roster. So Lohr tackled the personnel issue despite the fact that the city had told department heads that they were getting no more employees and may even be facing layoffs. He wrote to Gimeno, "If we were to place three additional people on each shift ... would [the rating change] be immediate or on a time duration based formula?" Gimeno: "The credit would be immediate, as long as we had some solid proof that the people were hired and on the roster." Say that again? Peachtree City could achieve a Class 3 rating, lower insurance premiums, and a more effective fire department almost instantly by hiring nine firefighter/EMTs and we haven't done it? Did I mention that of seven Georgia cities approximately the size of Peachtree City, six have at least 15 career firefighters on duty per shift (to our 11-to-12), and five have a Class 3 rating? We are the only one of those cities that also provides emergency medical service through the fire department, and three-quarters of the 2,152 calls we served in 2002 were medical. And we did it all with fewer responders. The fire department needs to hire 10 more people now: three firefighter/EMTs or paramedics per shift, plus an assistant to the fire marshal. Last year, when this request was made, the department was denied additional personnel. It appears this will happen again in the upcoming budget. Money is tight in this failing economy, but there are some things we can't let slide, among them the safety of our families. In these troublous times, the fire department is our first line of defense. If there were another attack on our soil, or you were involved in an accident, or your dad had a heart attack, or your dirty chimney caught fire, whom will you call? [Sallie Satterthwaite is the only newspaper columnist we know about who has a fire station named for her.]
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