– Gary McCarraher, Fire Chief
"think of a fire engine as a rolling tool box"
4 personnel out with duty related injuries, and thereby they are operating at reduced staffing
Station 2 can only deploy one vehicle per call (Station 1 can deploy 2 vehicles per call)
education of over 5,000 folks annually primarily seniors and students
concern with a potential spike in calls due to the industrial parks
one new nursing center is online (King St) and another one under construction (East Central)
the number of simultaneous calls is increasing
increase from 44% to 54%
concerned with growth in receiving more than 2 at a time, nearly one a day for the 2014 fiscal year
majority occur 10:00 AM through 7:00 PM
equally distributed over the days of the week
mutual aid calls are increasing
Fire Dept is the lead agency Franklin in emergency management
coordinates any State and Federal resources as necessary
addition of citizen volunteers to the emergency management preparations
Ping4alerts - smart phone app to receive information (no registration required)
training for this system is scheduled next week with roll-out scheduled shortly thereafter
ConnectCTY registration is encouraged
multiple phone #s and email addresses can be added to the notifications
Q - do you need a 3rd ambulance?
A - I need to dig into the data to right size a solution
Q - what is public assistance?
A - exhausted their capacity to find help to get back into bed, and calls like that
the overall call volume isn't going up, but the simultaneous calls are increasing and becoming a concern
Q - the 12 mins for mutual aid concerns me, we need ot try and figure it out
A - that will be the centerpiece of our 2016 budget to figure that out
A- we have a five year plan and it ran out, but we are doing a new plan more incident and need driven, a methodology to say when we get to this level we need to add folks
Q - why haven't we looked at using volunteers/
A - our experience with that, we ended the on call program in 2001, but keeping the program staffed to handle it properly is difficult. I grew up with volunteer fire depts. My father used to get out of his steel mill to go on a call. Folks can't do that anymore. Work is not that forgiving.
Q - we are loosing revenues outside the community
A - we are a little high on the requests in, we are higher on the units coming in. It used to be a wash but now we are running a deficit
Q - the nursing home on 140 is going to hire an ambulance?
A - they are outside our capacity to respond at about 9 mins, we target getting there in less than 8. It is before the ZBA and I sent another memo this week to the ZBA
Q - it is not just another ambulance, it is staffing to go along with it
A - absolutely correct.
Nutting - the grant runs out and we'll need to fund the four ourselves and then look to increasing in some way. You need to hire four to have any effect so that would be about 300,000 to budget for
Q - what is the status of the regional dispatch
A- snails are passing us. We have identified a property in Norfolk, going to bid for software and equipment. I think we are starting to get traction
Nutting -we had a board of directors meeting yesterday to proceed with the purchase of the land, it has been frustrating but this is a better location. we also get to build out from scratch
solar training
A - we haven't had that training yet, but it is looked forward
even at night the hazard is not abandoned. we are all moving quickly to learn and keep our folks safe
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