One legacy of 9-11 is the way all fire departments were able to leverage the sympathy into big budget increases.....I talked to a town commissioner in a small beach town in NC. The average income for the county is 26,000. The firefighters, who mostly have nothing to do, make 60K plus all the goobermint benefits and security.
I suspect this is not the only town in America with an under worked over paid fire department.
I think they get to bill. In many cases there is no need for a traditional fire truck to respond to a heart attack call. Double billing.
Lift weights, eat, sleep, watch TV. Follow ambulance crews around town, retire at 55 with a full pension.
With modern advances in home construction and fire prevention nobody has fires anymore. If you asked a firefighter how many actual fires he saw in his career, he'd say one or two.
Another time it was an hispanic male who complained about injuring his shoulder in a soccer game; turns out he'd strained his muscle. They gave him a sling, and then he told them he was having trouble with his bowel movements. They prepared to take him to the ER, but when he learned he had to give the ER some identification, he declined (can you say illegal?). All they could do was tell him to go see a doctor.
I work in a medium sized police dept.ina medium sized city. All firemen are also emt’s This is because not every town has a rescue squad big enuff to respond to all the calls. I have waited for for quite awhile waiting on the squad...people are thankful that life saving personnel are coming...and they don’t care where they come from
Impact fees and ambulance bills near $10,000, oh yeah.
In most communities, what used to be fire departments are now better described as emergency medicine departments that also extinguish fires. Nevertheless, they have a monopoly on firefighting skills, and the community will always have to maintain an adequate fire suppression capability, and that dictates the number of stations needed and your minimum personnel requirements. What our community has done is staff the minimum suppression staff, insist that they all be cross-trained in medical responses, then hired additional single purpose medical personnel. The latter are considerably cheaper than unionized firefighters, yet are fully qualified to provide emergency medical services, including transport.
Where the dividing line is between the staffing needed to provide fire and paramedic services, and the additional staff needed once the spare time of the career firefighting personnel has been reached is a matter of community size and standards. In our case, we crossed that line about five years ago, and the decision to hire people who were solely dedicated to the paramedic function has worked well.
The way it works here, a medical aid call gets the closest engine company, whose firefighter/paramedic provides immediate care, then the patient is turned over to the single purpose paramedics for transport.
I think that’s going to become a pretty common arrangement for mid-sized cities. You get maximum use out of your expensive personnel, then handle the overload in a more cost effective manner.
BTW, there’s an awful lot of smoke from a CO “prescribed” burn that wasn’t publicized much. Very windy, too.
Oh... and... Resuscitation trained EMT’s are nice, but fully trained paramedics provide a better standard of care. Fire departments should make paramedic certification a prerequisite for hiring.
It’s true. Our guys don’t have anything to do and a 911 call gets the fire truck guys out along with an ambulance. Kinda nuts.
The ignorance on this thread needs an ambulance.
In our region probably 90% of the time it's medical aid, injury vehicle collisions which are responded to. Most fires here are generally brush fires which occurs maybe 3 months in summer.
In fact, it's typical to see half a dozen vehicles, including rescue trucks, cop cars, fire engines, and paramedics responding to a simple medical aid situation.
I am glad they are there. Saving a life either way.
Most cities now have codes and ordinances that keep fires to a minimum. Where the real fire-fighting action is is with Rural Volunteer Fire departments- many houses out in the country are old and haven’t been upgraded.
911 calls are a good profit center for the city. They won’t go ‘in network’ with insurers so they don’t have to accept negotiated rates. And since they are out of network, the insurer will pay very little. So the victim gets victimized.
This was going on when I was a Police Officer in the late 70's, early 80's. The FD for one city provided service for two cities and the surrounding area. Most of the calls were Medical. We'd (the Officers) would hear the tone alert for every run.
The other major town in the area was doing the same thing. Med calls have always far outnumbered fire call. I guess it's only a problem now because a 'reporter' has taken notice of it.
Ed
My son says one of the reason the fire department in our town responds to medical emergencies is that the EMTs need help with increasingly common large people.
Also volunteer EMTs and firefighters often are about 60 years old and a lot are needed to get one job done