Firefighter Staffing

As we head into the spring (sometime the snow will go away) Pend Oreille Fire District No. 3 seems to get busier every year. One of my responsibilities as Fire Chief is to ensure an adequate response to requests for service. As you know one person can’t respond alone, no matter the type of call. Sometimes this causes me concern. Daytime responses typically see lower staffing levels in Fire District No. 3. These calls deserve the same level of response as others.

We have approached this issue with additional mutual aid requests for more personnel and that will work from time to time. In the future as we grow, we will be faced with the question of how to effectively serve our community by providing adequate first response or first alarm arriving, assessing the issue and effectively mitigating the emergency.

As a firefighter with years of experience and having witnessed many types of staffing solutions, I have my opinions. I’d like you to place yourself in the Chief's boots and share with me (and others) how do I provide an adequate response? Remember there are fiscal and other restraints that should guide your thought process. I look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Chief Mark Havener 3-5-08

2 Comments

GOOD ONE!!!!!! This will probably be this hardest one yet. I have waited to add a comment for some time while I tried to come up with a good response on this. Without being able to hire one or two full time firefighters for the daytime, there are only two other options I can think of. The first one has been talked about for a while now and still may happen. That is a merger with Fire District No. 4. The other one is to make arrangements with employers in our district that would allow firefighters who work for them to respond to calls during the day. Other then those two, we would need to recruit more volunteers who are available during the daytime hours.

Posted by D. keck 3-25-08

I see the dilemma and understand that everyone, no matter the event or emergency, deserves a full response. Could we do a sign-up as we do for the night; or perhaps create a list of who will be available when? The list might include the days people are working and when they will be out of town. This would allow us to know approximately how many people would be in the district around what time so on the days we know we are going to be short of staff, we could add mutual aid on the call and not waste time waiting to see if people are going to come. That way we would have a backup. It is always easier to stand down another district than it is to have them come later. This is just an idea of what can be done when we know we will only have one or two responding.

Posted by Michelle Barnett - POFD3 Firefighter/EMT 3-5-08

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