How Many Officers Do You Have In Your Department

I came from a large department in New York
where we had 300 plus members. We also had
seven companies within the department. Each
company had a Captain & 2 lieutenants. The
department had as follows:
4- Chiefs
7- Captains
14-Lieutenants

In the small department i'm serving with here
in South Carolina, has approximatly 40 members.
We have as follows:
3- Chiefs
3- Captains
4- Lieutenants

So how many officers dose your department have ????

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mick Shelley on June 6, 2009 at 1:08pm

Thanks to all those that responded to this discussion.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Justin/ F-225 on June 6, 2009 at 11:11pm

Nope. We used to but the guys started abusing their rank and got into a power struggle. That was the end of that. At least that is what I have been told.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jonathan on June 7, 2009 at 12:06am

We're a small Airport Department with 14 members.
1-Chief (head of dept)
1-Asst Chief (head of ems)
1-senior captain (head of fire)
2-shift captains
A total of 5 officers and 9 firefighters, a bit heavy on the officer side in my opinion.

My old volunteer department we had:
1-Chief
1-asst chief
3-station captains
3-lieutenants
A total of 8 officers with roughly 15-20 firefighters.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jonathan on June 7, 2009 at 12:12am

Matt,
How big of an area do y'all cover? How many calls do y'all respond to a year on average? Do you have to call for mutual aid often?
I ask this because my old VFD it got to a point for a couple months where we mainly had 7 people responding to every call (the same 7 out of our total 25 members) and we relied heavily on mutual aid with the city.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matthew on June 7, 2009 at 12:55am

I want to say we cover about 60sq miles, not 100% on it though. There are probably about 500-1k people over our whole area which is in 2 different counties. We don't have a lot of calls yearly, We may run 40-50 a year. A lot of our calls are for wrecks and brush fires, not a lot of structure fires thankfully, and we don't make any ems runs. We're plagued with communication problems though, we can't talk to or hear two of our mutual aid departments over any of our radios (we're on completely different communication systems).

Really the only time we ask for mutual aid, or are asked to aid another department, is in the event of a structure fire, a really large brush fire, or if another call comes in and we/they are all tied up on another call, that's really a rare event though. For wrecks if we need help it's easier to wait for law enforcement and the ambulance service to arrive than have other departments paged, so a lot of the time we have to make do with what and who we have until then.