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HOW MANY CHIEFS DOES YOUR DEPT. HAVE? WHERE ARE YOUR DEPT. PRIORITIES?
I'M NOT SURE WHERE MY QUESTION BEST FITS, BUT HERE IT GOES ANYWAY. HOW MANY CHIEFS DOES YOUR DEPARTMENT HAVE IN RELATION TO FF'S, STATIONS, CALL VOLUME, AREA COVERED, POPULATION? HERE'S OUR SITUATION, WE RUN 1500 CALLS A YEAR, OUT OF 2 STATIONS COVERING AN AREA ABOUT 110 SQ. MILES WITH ABOUT 13,000 RESIDENTS. WE HAVE 2 FIRST OUT ENGINES, 1 LADDER, 2 TANKERS, 2 BRUSH TRUCKS, AND 2 MED UNITS ALL COVERED BY 9 ON DUTY PERSONNEL. OUR MINIMUM STAFFING IS 6 (3 AT EACH STATION). DO THE MATH, WE ARE GROSSLY UNDERSTAFFED. HERE'S THE KICKER, WE HAVE 7 CHIEFS,(4 ARE ADMINISTRATIVE, AND 3 ARE DUTY CHIEFS) AND A SECRATERY TO RUN THIS RELATIVELY SMALL OPERATION. I FORGOT TO MENTION WE HAVE A VERY SMALL BUDGET AT 2.1 MILLION PER YEAR. THERE ARE A LOT OF DAYS THAT WE HAVE A LOT MORE CHIEFS THAN FF'S ON DUTY THERE MUST BE A HELL OF ALOT OF PAPERWORK TO DO.WE JUST SEEM TO BE VERY TOP HEAVY AND ARE BATTLING WITH MANAGEMENT ON STAFFING AND WAGE ISSUES WITH NOT MUCH LUCK. ANYWAY I KNOW THIS IS ALOT OF INFO GIVEN, BUT PLEASE I'D LIKE TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR SITUATIONS AND WHAT YOU THINK. I'D ALSO LIKE TO HEAR FROM A FEW CHIEF OFFICERS AS WELL.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by DAN MELTON on
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Sorry, I will do so in the future.
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Permalink Reply by Jenny Holderby on
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Where do you put 7 chiefs in 2 stations? It sounds like what you are calling Chiefs, around here in the few career depts I am familiar with, we would call Assistant or Deputy Chiefs or Shift Captians.
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Our administration offices are connected to station 1. We have the fire chief, deputy chief, 2 division chiefs
(training and inspection/maintanance) and 3 duty chiefs (shift commanders).
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Permalink Reply by Paul Montpetit on
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We run about 400 calls a tear....small rural area but a huge area land mass wise....## of Chiefs..?? Officially 3...Chief....1st Asst , and 2nd Asst...But if you go to some calls you would swear there are at least 10.....people forget their places sometimes....Paul
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Permalink Reply by Chris Parliman on
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You say your budget is small at $2.1 million, I have to laugh at that, my department covers 55 square miles with a population of roughly 3,000, we run a rescue/pumper, engine, tanker, brush truck, and a medical truck out of one staion running 250 - 350 call a year on a budget of $200,000. We have 3 chiefs (Chief, 1st Assist, 2nd Assist). We run our calls with 7 to 10 people, did I mention we are all volunteer no paid member in the department? In the 7 - 10 people that show up to a call 2 or 3 of them are officers chief, captian, lieutenant.
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So technically you have a fire chief with a staff of 6 people for 3 shifts, correct? It doesn't sound like it is actually the number of people & what their jobs are that you have an issue with but their titles. We are all volunteer with 1 Chief, the Assistant Chief is responsible for one station, maintenance on the building & equipment, the Deputy Chief is responsible for the other station. One is responsible for helping with administrative duties, the other with personnel issues. But they work well together in sharing responsibility & taking care of business.
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Permalink Reply by FETC on
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NFPA has a response volume to firefighter ratio that drives the number of fire personnel needed to be on duty. If each of your individual firefighters run on 300 calls per year, you have adequate staffing. More than 300 then you are under staffed, less than 300 per man you are over staffed. If you use FH software, pull an annual response que for the firefighters and see how many call you actually went on individually. With 1500, you might be surprised how many you actually responded to yourself.
HOW MANY CHIEF's YOU ASKED? ANSWER 3 CHIEFS TOTAL
1 Fire Chief
2 Deputy Chief's
- One Assigned to Operations
- One Assigned to Adminstration
1 Captain Training
1 Captain Prevention / Code Enforcement
1 Lieutenant Fire Alarm
1 Non FF Secretary
Everyone above works Monday to Friday 8-4, they are Staff Personnel.
We are a Combination Paid and Volunteer Department
Shift Personnel Man 2 stations with a minimum of 6 and 3 FF's
Call Volume: 4000 Emergencies per year, providing Fire, Rescue, Level A Hazmat and Paramedic Level EMS
We protect 32.5 square miles
Bedroom population 25K / Daytime population with college and industry 60K
We provide Contract ALS/EMS for 5 surrounding towns
We provide Contract to neighboring town to be their FD (they have none)
4 Operations Shifts with 10 PAID firefighters each
-Shift Make up
Captain at Central
Two Lieutenant's (one at each station)
7 Firefighters
Minimum SHIFT staffing of 9 PAID PERSONNEL, (not counting any of the Mon-Fri Staff)
Volunteers have own tone alert for 1st Alarm or greater responses. They don't hear or respond on Stills.
They also do not cover any shifts or seats for the minimum of 9. Ride-a-longs are just extra manpower.
Budget 3.75
I assume when you say "Duty Chief's" these are shift officers who run the suppression shifts. We have a Captain on each shift that run the shift operations. Our three Chief Officer's each are assigned a week of "on-call" as the DUTY CHIEF for multi-alarms incidents. Otherwise the Captains are left to manage the troops.
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Permalink Reply by Jay Nicholson on
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Population 25K. 1 station with 2 engines. 1 chief, 1 deputy chief/fire marshal and now 1 ac in charge of training. Each engine has 1 captain, 1 engineer and 1 FF. Chief rotate duty and will respond on a 1st alarm. Budget 3.4M. Besides the budget, the difference is our chiefs pull double duty on incidences where you have an assigned shift commander. The question to ask though is if you changed the a/cs down, how much more effective would your dept. be. From the outside, it looks like your chief just wants a command person on every incident. That may or may not be a good thing. You feel it isn't. I tend to agree with you.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Buck on
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we cover around 55sq miles. we have 1 chief and 3 asst. chiefs
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Permalink Reply by rav3375 on
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in my department we have 1cheif a first asset cheis and a second ass cheif and a forth ass chein our therd ass cheif is ower amb capt and we are just a small town volentere compney and for fires we useal get any wheres from 20 top 30 guyes respond it may tack about 30 min all to gether during the day to get that maney but we manage ether by are self or with muteral aid from nabering compneys
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