Fire call and response

When a Spokane resident calls 911 with symptoms of a heart attack, the first responding vehicle likely will be a shiny red firetruck.

It’s a system that Spokane City Council members Steve Corker and Bob Apple say takes years off the lifespan of expensive fire engines at a time when more than 80 percent of calls don’t require firefighting equipment.

Like many cities’ departments, Spokane’s Fire Department has experienced a significant increase in medical runs over the past several years, while fire calls have remained steady or declined. In 2006, only 17 percent of the department’s calls were fire-related.

Fire personnel are considered the first responders in a medical emergency call. Ambulances, which are operated by a private contractor, respond when someone might need transportation to a hospital.

Corker and Apple say the city should consider purchasing cheaper trucks designed for medical emergencies and using the fire engines to fight fires.

“We’re wearing out the firetrucks running the firetrucks to things we don’t need to haul them to,” Apple said.

That concern was one of the reasons Corker last week asked for a delay in buying four new fire engines at a cost of almost $2 million. Three days later, the City Council, including Corker, unanimously approved the purchase. Councilman Bob Apple was absent from the vote.

But the issue will likely resurface the next time the city replaces fire vehicles.

And Spokane Fire Chief Bobby Williams says another Fire Department trend makes Corker and Apple’s suggestion ill-advised. In 1988, the department responded to 15,400 calls with an average of 75 employees on duty at a time. This year, the city expects to respond to more than 28,000 calls with 17 fewer uniformed fire employees on duty.

Only two of the city’s 14 fire stations have more than one crew working at a time. If a fire breaks out near a fire station that sends a crew to a medical call, it’s better for that crew to use a fire engine – because then it can go directly to the fire without switching trucks, Williams said. It would add significantly to response time if a crew had to return to a station to switch trucks, he added.

Corker argues that fire crews don’t abandon medical calls when a fire is reported. “Typically, what happens is another (fire)house has to be called anyway,” he said.

Greg Borg, president of the Spokane Firefighters Union, said with current staffing it’s especially important to use fire engines for medical runs during peak hours, when the department often responds to multiple calls at once.

“We’ve just been cut so much we don’t have any spare people” to send out crews without fire engines, Borg said.

Partly because of the increase in medical calls, Spokane’s fire engines are racking up about 10,000 miles a year. The department’s goal is to replace firetrucks every 13 years, preferably before they reach 100,000 miles.

Art Nichols, chief of the department’s maintenance division, said 100,000 miles is a lot of miles for a fire engine. That’s partly because they are driven fast, he said, especially considering their weight, and they traverse Spokane’s bumpy streets.

The city’s trucks used to last two or three decades and still travel fewer than 60,000 miles, he said. Now all five of the city’s engines that went into service in 2001 have topped 60,000. When a truck needs maintenance, one of the city’s six reserve engines goes into service. Five of those are 1977 models.

“They’re getting the hell beat out of them,” Nichols said.

This year, the Spokane City Council hired an additional six firefighters. The hires were part of a plan unveiled last year by former Mayor Dennis Hession to start a “peak activity” company that would be on duty during hours the department experiences the most calls.

Although the extra firefighters have been hired and trained, their addition has not boosted the number of firefighters on duty. That’s because the hires have been used to fill spots of sick or injured employees. Williams said that firefighters have used more sick time than usual because of injuries and that it makes financial sense to use the new firefighters to fill spots instead of paying overtime. When the injured firefighters go back on duty, the city will get a boost to its on-duty number, he said.

Borg said negotiations between the city and union about creating a peak activity unit stopped after Hession left office in November. The union favors stationing the extra firefighters in northeast Spokane – an area hit hard in staff cuts a few years ago. But he said the group is open to discussing a peak activity company.

“We want more firefighters on the street,” Borg said.