By Richard Gaines
Staff writer
Tue, May 13 2008 The firefighters union and Mayor Carolyn Kirk have agreed in principle to a new model for deployment that would put optimal-sized teams on trucks at headquarters — even if it means fewer trucks and fewer outlying stations in service. In fire safety circles, "per piece manning" is the term for the approach that the union and mayor have endorsed in negotiations to settle a contract that expired last July. The willingness of both sides in contract negotiations to discuss the details of their talks publicly is highly unusual. Chief Barry McKay yesterday declined to comment on the agreement, which the mayor and union leaders discussed at length with the Times this week in separate interviews. McKay explained how "per piece manning" would change deployment, which traditionally in Gloucester has emphasized spreading the available firefighters on a shift as broadly as possible in an effort to keep teams in the outlying stations. With per-piece manning, McKay said, the teams might arrive from headquarters somewhat later than if deployed from a neighborhood station, but when they get to a fire, their capacity to fight it and remain safe would be maximized. The new element for Gloucester, he said, is ensuring that the pumper truck and ladder at headquarters are fully staffed — four to five on the pumper and three or four on the ladder. In recent years, as lean budgets have shaved resources, the teams on those centrally stationed trucks have been reduced in order to create two-person teams to operate pumpers based in the outlying stations. Responding to a fire with a truck manned by only two firefighters is considered unsafe and is not recommended in today's fire safety thinking, said union president Barry Aptt and vice president Phil Bouchie. "Fire companies whose primary functions are to pump and deliver water and perform basic firefighting at fires ... shall be staffed with a minimum of four on-duty personnel," reads the 2004 standard of the National Fire Protection Association. Aptt said multiple studies in Providence, R.I., St. Louis, Dallas and Salt Lake City have shown that arriving a little later with the right-sized team to use the technology at hand achieves better results than a quicker arrival with inadequate forces. "This is definitely the direction we're heading," Bouchie said. "Choices have to be made here," said Kirk, who began studying firefighting in 2004 when, as a member of the School Committee, she spent an overnight shift at Central Station on School Street. Her campaign for mayor boasted a number of prominent firefighters, including Deputy Chief Miles Schlichte, an outspoken critic of the status quo methods of firefighting in Gloucester. Kirk also said that once the 2009 budget is set in June, there will be no "supplemental budgets," which were used often in recent years to patch shortfalls. "I'm not doing that," she said. Because of the city's geography, a starfish arrangement of long peninsulas, the substations in Bay View, Magnolia and West Gloucester (and East Gloucester, until it was closed in the 1990s) have been seen as essential outposts for the most isolated sectors of Gloucester. The last comprehensive study of firefighting in Gloucester, published in 1992, noted that with the outlying stations closed, the advised 4- to 6-minute response time more than doubles. "Over the years, the city of Gloucester has decided that a 6-minute response time is the appropriate level of service to provide to its citizens," wrote the MMA Consulting Group. But the consultants noted that the city then — and for the last time — was operating five stations. Shortly after the report was published, the city gave up trying to staff the East Gloucester station as the fourth substation, and introduced the model used today — stretching ever-thinning ranks to keep open as many of the remaining three substations as possible. Aptt said when he joined the force in 1994, the city had 87 firefighters. Today it has 77. In recent years, the impetus was to keep substations open, even if it meant short-staffing the trucks across the city. In August 2006, while the Bay View station was closed, a fire broke out in Lanesville and a woman died. The response time was more than 10 minutes, but had Bay View been open, the response time would have been about three minutes. After that tragedy, then-Mayor John Bell directed McKay to open all stations all the time. Last September, McKay announced staffing with overtime to fill vacancies in shifts had all but exhausted his budget, and he abandoned the effort at full station openings. Twice in February, without overtime to allocate for call backs, all stations except headquarters were closed for parts of shifts. Voters in 2004 overwhelmingly rejected a $1.1 million override that was promoted as a way to avoid station closings. Even the union remained out of the fight and many members actually voted against the tax hike, saying they were skeptical about whether the money would be spent on firefighting resources. Within days of the override defeat, McKay began rolling station closings for the first time since the recovery from the recession of the early '90s. On numerous occasions, the force protested the closed stations. Aptt and Bouchie said they believed and trusted Kirk as a negotiating partner. She told the Times the goal is to provide a force that is "sustainable fiscally." She sent a memo to the council last week that estimated the current budget is running about $800,000 in the red. She said she would close the deficit with austerity measures, including holding open vacant positions. A state of the city report is due from Kirk on April 9 — the 100th day of her term. Staff writer Richard Gaines may be contacted at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
—
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.