Union: Fla. fire, EMS workers ‘getting destroyed mentally and physically’ by excessive overtime
In the past year, Polk County first responders have been asked to pick up 4,495 mandatory OT shifts, totaling 89,434 hours
September 02, 2021 – By: Dustin Wyatt – For The Ledger, Lakeland, Fla.
POLK COUNTY, Fla. — At a time when they’re responding to more 911 calls than usual during a pandemic, Polk County’s firefighters and EMS personnel are “getting destroyed mentally and physically” by all of the overtime they’re required to work due to low staffing levels as more employees leave, union leaders told The Ledger.
In the past year, Polk’s first responders have been asked to pick up a total of 4,495 mandatory overtime shifts. That amounts to 89,434 hours of mandatory overtime across the department, at a cost of $2.5 million to taxpayers, according to data from Aug. 1, 2020 to Aug. 20, 2021, provided to the Polk County Professional Firefighters union by the county.
And the overtime — equal to roughly 449 hours per employee in the past year — isn’t just a few hours at a time here and there. In most cases, the employees tasked with responding quickly to life or death emergencies are required to pick up 24-hour shifts once their regular 24-hour workday ends, union representatives say.
That means they’re sometimes working 48 hours on end before getting a day of reprieve. The normal schedule for Polk County’s first responders consists of a 24-hour shift followed by two consecutive days off.
“Forty-eight hours straight is not uncommon,” said union Vice President Jon Hall, a five-year employee of the county’s Fire Rescue Division. “There are way more people in our department working 48 hours at a time than there are people working the normal 24 hours. That stretch of 48 hours off doesn’t actually exist.”
County Manager Bill Beasley did not return an email or a phone call regarding the union’s comments.
In an email, Mianne Nelson, the county’s communications director, noted that a lot of counties are struggling to fill vacancies.
One example in Florida is Volusia County, which has lost 21 paramedics this year. The staffing challenges prompted the county to roll out $4,500 recruiting and $5,000 retention bonuses last month, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
Another: Lake County, which had 41 vacancies in its EMS division as of Aug. 17, prompting the rural county to turn to neighboring communities to help with 911 calls, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
“Polk County Fire Rescue is not unlike any other organization today, in that there are vacant positions that are difficult to keep filled,” Nelson said in the email.
Polk Fire Rescue currently has 199 employees working a combined 4,776 staffing hours per day to meet the county’s response goals, she said.
Since 911 calls never stop and the county has to ensure that there are enough bodies in ambulances and in fire trucks to serve the public, Nelson noted that overtime is the only answer to not only vacancies but also employees on vacation or leave.
She said that all Fire Rescue employees are given sufficient latitude, per union bargaining agreements, to schedule or choose when they will be available for mandatory overtime.
She said that mandatory overtime accounted for 4.85% of the total hours worked in the past year, and that 74% of the overtime worked was voluntary.
“In other words, these were employees who chose to work overtime,” Nelson said.
In the email, she also touched on COVID-19 and how the county has had to adjust.
“Our human capital resources are stretched in this COVID pandemic,” Nelson said. ” Polk County Fire Rescue has had to put additional transport vehicles (ambulances) into service to meet the increased call demand and the capacity concerns at our area hospitals.”
Hall and union President Lee Stringer told The Ledger these challenges weren’t introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s an issue they’ve raised to county leadership for half a decade.
“Staffing has been a nightmare; it’s not even a COVID issue,” Stringer said. “It’s an issue we’ve been having for years since about 2015.”
But the pandemic has exacerbated the situation as the 911 call volume soars and more people leave the department.
On Aug. 13, the county reported that there were 35 vacancies within the Fire Rescue Division. In the past week, three more employees have quit, Stringer said.
The county confirmed that number. One left for maternity reasons, and one left because they live out of the county and took a position closer to their home, Nelson said. It’s unclear what happened with the other employee.
To make matters worse, many first responders have been out over the past year because of COVID.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been 205 Fire Rescue employees who have missed more than 16,000 hours of work because they have either tested positive for COVID or reported COVID-type symptoms and could not work until they had negative tests, Nelson said.
Also, on any given day, there are about 30 employees (positions) on leave for such reasons as illness, military time off, funerals or vacations, according to the county.
These staffing shortcomings have reached extreme levels at a time when the department is responding to as many 400 emergency calls per day, roughly 42% more than usual.
Polk County Fire Chief Robert Weech, who did not return a phone call or email for this story, told the County Commission on Aug. 17 that the emergency response system is “critically stretched.”
He encouraged the public to avoid calling 911 if they can help it. “If you have other ways of getting medical care, you need to exhaust those at this time so that we can deal with those other bigger emergencies.”
Despite the system strain, Weech said his employees have been able to keep up for the most part and 70% of patients have not seen a delay in response times.
But in some parts of the county, ambulances are reaching patients as much as four minutes slower than usual, Weech said.
That’s due, in part, to the time it takes patients to get admitted once they arrive via ambulance at the hospital.
He told the commission that he’s proud of his team.
“Our first responders are working hard,” Weech said, “That’s a group that’s committed, even when there is strain. I’m very proud of those folks.”
Nelson also thanked first responders in her response to The Ledger.
“We are proud and thankful for the dedication and outstanding care that our Polk County Fire Rescue employees have shown to our residents and guests, especially during this long, unprecedented pandemic.
Union leaders told The Ledger that the department is still able to provide a “high level of service” to the public. But Hall and Stringer fear it’s only a matter of time before the under-staffing and excessive overtime, if not addressed, results in burnout, lethargy, costly mistakes or oversights.
“Our concern is that we can’t do this forever,” Hall said. “How long can they keep this up?”
With few days off, employees are missing family time. They’re unable to attend their son’s or daughter’s sporting events or recitals, Hall said.
“The duty these people signed up for is being overrun,” he said. “We are being steamrolled.”
Added Stringer, “These guys are just getting destroyed both physically and mentally.”
(c)2021 The Ledger (Lakeland, Fla.)
CA Fire Season on Pace to Match Record 2020
With the massive Caldor and Dixie fires still burning, California’s fire season is on course to match the record 4.2 million acres burned last year.
September 8, 2021 – By Michael Cabanatuan – Source San Francisco Chronicle
Sep. 8—With the once-unstoppable Caldor Fire racing to the doorstep of South Lake Tahoe before it was steered away, and the Dixie Fire, the second largest in state history, still raging farther north, it’s been a hellish fire season in Northern California.
And it’s not over, Cal Fire Director Chief Thom Porter cautioned Tuesday morning.
“We are on a par with where we were last year,” he said during a briefing. “That’s sobering, that’s the new reality, that’s what we are looking at.”
Fires burned through roughly 2 million acres by this time in 2020, he said, on the way to a total of 4.2 million acres — the worst in the state’s long history of wildfires. So far this year, fires have again ripped through 2 million acres, with the devastation continuing.
“We could be in the same boat,” he said. “We’re right in the middle of wildfire peak season.”
Forecasters predict the next three months will bring more dry weather and bouts of gusty winds, Porter said.
“Fire activity will continue to grow,” he said.
Anthony Scardina, a deputy regional forester with the U.S. Forest Service, said hot and windy weather is expected across the state for the next two days.
Despite warming temperatures, firefighters took advantage of gentler winds to make progress on the Caldor Fire, which began its march toward Lake Tahoe more than three weeks ago. It was 50% contained Tuesday, and most South Lake Tahoe residents have been allowed to return home after a week under evacuation orders.
But the danger is not over. The fire, which erupted near Grizzly Flats in rural western El Dorado County on Aug. 14 and has burned through 217,000 acres, on Tuesday continued to threaten Kirkwood, the ski resort and small community south of Lake Tahoe on Highway 88.
While the fire remained calm in South Lake Tahoe, it was still active in Kirkwood, with fire spreading through the tops of trees and wind throwing flaming embers well ahead of the fire, starting spot fires more often than not.
“For every 10 sparks that land in the forest, nine of them light fire,” said Dominic Polito, a Caldor Fire spokesperson.
In addition to chasing and snuffing out spot fires, firefighters have been taking advantage of light winds to set backfires and burn off potential fuel around houses and other structures in the area, he said.
The Kirkwood area and other areas along Highway 88 remained evacuated. Thirty helicopters were expected to make water drops in the area on Tuesday, pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons on the fire.
Fire crews have extended containment lines from Meyers along Pioneer Trail in South Lake Tahoe, which allowed authorities to lift mandatory evacuation orders for most of the city, particularly the areas near the lake, said Jaime Moore, a spokesperson for the eastern edge of the fire.
Evacuation orders remained in effect near Heavenly Mountain resort, where crews were extinguishing some hot spots and keeping an eye out for small fires that start when sparks jump containment lines. Meyers and Christmas Valley, where the flames first entered the Tahoe Basin, also remained evacuated, in part due to danger from a large number of charred trees in danger of falling, Moore said.
“When you’re looking at South Lake Tahoe itself, mostly the threat is gone, but obviously we don’t want to get complacent and say the threat is gone,” he said. “Mother Nature has been working in our favor, but things can change.”
Crews were keeping an eye on the winds, which had been light and from the west but were forecast to shift to the southwest and may pick up speed, Moore said.
Mark Ghilarducci, California Office of Emergency Services director, urged returnees to remain vigilant.
“Even though these area have been repopulated, it’s still important to remember that we have active fire in the areas. We are not out of the woods yet.”
Forty miles away on the west end of the fire, in addition to Kirkwood, the blaze was most active in the Wrights Lake area, where fire crews have to hike in or get dropped in, Polito said. Much of the area near where the fire started has had evacuation orders lifted, and residents returned over the weekend — except in the town of Grizzly Flats, which was devastated by the fire and is filled with utility crews and tree trimmers.
Despite the voracity of this year’s fires, Cal Fire’s Porter said firefighters have saved several communities from the flames: South Lake Tahoe, Meyers, Pollock Pines, Sly Park, Hayfork, Willits, Chester, Lake Almanor West, Westwood, Susanville and Janesville.
“All were protected, all are still intact,” he said. “We’ve been able to herd these fires outside and around the main community corridors. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do that everywhere, but these are some of the large communities that have been protected.”
The Dixie Fire, which ignited July 14 and is still burning across five counties to the north of the Caldor Fire, was 59% contained on Tuesday. The Dixie Fire had grown to more than 919,000 acres — threatening to rival California’s largest wildfire, the August Complex, which consumed 1,032,648 acres last year.
Near Auburn in Placer County, evacuations were lifted Tuesday for the Bridge Fire, which was 411 acres and 50% contained after erupting Sunday under the Foresthill Bridge. The Auburn State Recreation Area remained closed.
(c)2021 the San Francisco Chronicle
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Concerns Mount as Minneapolis FD Ranks Diminish
As call volumes and the city’s population continue to increase, demands on the Minneapolis Fire Department are being amplified by fewer personnel.
September 7, 2021 – By Christina Saint Louis – Star Tribune
When Capt. Cory Martin clocks in for his 24-hour shift at the Minneapolis Fire Department’s Station 6 every other day, he expects it to be scattered with flashing fluorescent lights and tonal alarms, the programmed system that alerts firefighters of a call for service.
Located in Stevens Square, Station 6 is Minneapolis’ busiest, with an engine that responded to nearly 6,000 calls last year. There, firefighters often sleep in uniform to be ready for calls throughout the night, Martin said.
“Dinner, any sort of thing, we know that we’re going to get interrupted,” he said. “No one really expects to complete anything without getting up and going on a run.”
Calls to Station 6 have steadily increased over the past decade, with demands on the Fire Department outpacing the city’s population growth.
Minneapolis’ population increased by 12%, according to the most recent census data, while the overall demand on the Fire Department increased by 36%. The department went from responding to 33,601 calls in 2010 to 45,835 in 2020, according to MFD annual reports. The year before, the department responded to 49,602 calls.
But despite the high call volume — and the workload associated with it due to the COVID-19 pandemic — the number of firefighters in the city’s ranks dropped after the city offered a retirement incentive last year. For rank-and-file firefighters answering calls day and night, the shorthanded staffing is cause for concern.
Through it all, the number of sworn firefighters has hovered around 400, which means MFD’s engines are typically staffed with three firefighters rather than the National Fire Protection Association recommended four. The department aims for a daily staffing of at least 102 firefighters, but that goal was strained by the pandemic causing some of the remaining firefighters to take time away for virus-related isolation or leave. The exact number of how many had to do so was not immediately available.
As of last week, MFD’s staff is exactly 400 — the smallest it’s been since 2013, based on annual reports.
Fire Chief Bryan Turner said the number of firefighters is currently 19 below its authorized number, mainly because the department was unable to hold Cadet School in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19 restrictions.
As a result, the department is off schedule in its normal hiring process, he said.
“The department is currently in the process of putting together a new Civil Service list with the intention of hiring back to our authorized strength and conducting a Cadet School in February,” he said.
Newly hired cadets go through three to four months of training before they become city firefighters. That means a February class would not join stations until next May at the earliest.
While the Minneapolis Police Department was recently court-ordered to reach a minimum staffing level of 730 officers by next summer due to population increase and directives in the city charter, the Fire Department was not held to the same standard.
The charter is clear in stating that the City Council must fund a “a police force of at least 0.0017 employees per resident.” The section for fire service, however, is vague. ” The City Council must fund a fire department that can maintain adequate staffing,” it says.
“We are not adequately staffed,” said Mark Lakosky, president of the Local 82 firefighters’ union about MFD. “The citizens think it’s all great, we do a great job — and our members do — but [citizens] don’t know we could do better. We could be faster.”
Nothing about the actual job responsibilities gets adjusted when there are fewer people on a shift, Lakosky said. The equipment is just as heavy, the expectations when responding to a call are the same and the hose length doesn’t change.
“Everything we do doesn’t get easier because you give us less people,” he said. “It actually gets a lot more intense and a lot more taxing, physically, on firefighters.”
In addition to fires, engines respond to a range of rescue and medical emergencies. The firefighters may be called in to lift someone who is unable to move independently, scrub blood off pavement after a violent crime, or contain a natural gas leak, among other things.
One area of improvement Lakosky points to is the amount of time it takes firefighters to respond to calls. The National Fire Protection Association standard is that engines arrive at a given scene within four minutes 90% of the time. MFD has failed to reach that standard for at least the past sixteen years.
Arriving within four minutes 90% of the time is a minimum percentage, said Curt Floyd, a safety tech lead with NFPA. The hope is that departments can beat it, he said.
Still, Floyd recognizes that firefighters can face challenges when trying to arrive in that time frame, like already being out on another assignment, for example. “There are other things that they’re doing in the course of their day, and we never know when the call is going to come.”
That’s why NFPA’s standard is 90% of the time, not 100. The 2020 annual report shows that last year, stretched by the pandemic, MFD responded to fire and emergency medical service calls in “five minutes or less” only 70% of the time, the lowest in years.
And then there’s the issue of firefighter safety. Between 2019 and 2020, firefighter injuries jumped from 131 to 161. Station 6 alone has seen several injuries: a firefighter who injured his rotator cuff, another who blew out a knee and one who tore his Achilles’ tendon.
Three firefighters to an engine hasn’t always been MFD’s approach. Station 6 Chief Staffan Swanson recalled that most stations had engines staffed with four firefighters when he joined the Fire Department 30 years ago.
“Some of the slower, outlying areas had three, but certainly, all the downtown stations had four,” he said. So did Station 7, Station 5, Station 8, and everything on the North Side, Swanson said.
But as the department’s budgetary constraints tightened, that changed. Most recently, after the city instituted a hiring freeze and offered early retirement incentives to cut costs during the pandemic, the Fire Department has leaned into overtime to fill shifts. As a result, Mayor Jacob Frey’s proposed budget for 2022 allots an increase in MFD’s noncontractual overtime budget.
Tyner said he is working with Frey to find a solution to the department’s staff size.
“I am pursuing additional personnel above our current authorized strength to increase efficiency, spread out run volume in the downtown area and reduce overtime expenditures,” he said. Ultimately, “though we do staff four on the engines when the staffing is available, there is no plan to do that on a daily basis in the foreseeable future.”
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EVACUATIONS ORDERED AS FRENCH FIRE GROWS IN KERN COUNTY (CA)
Wildfires erupt in California burning acres of trees and threatening local residential areas.
August 21, 2021
The French Fire in Kern County started Wednesday, August 18, around 4:30 pm near the Wagy Flat area, southwest of Wofford Heights on the west side of Lake Isabella.
On Saturday, August 21, 2021 the French Fire west of Isabella Lake in Southern California exhibited group torching of trees and long-range spotting, but the activity slowed during the night. The blaze has burned 13,341 acres.
For Sunday firefighters were concerned about the spot fire west of Alta Sierra which is a threat for the residences in that area.
Additional spread is possible with upslope runs and long range spotting to the east.
Fire crews have confirmed that eight residences have been destroyed.
Evacuations are still in effect.
An evacuation center has been set up at the Kern River Valley Senior Center, 6405 Lake Isabella Blvd., Lake Isabella. Animal Services will assist with sheltering companion animals at the center.
CA Firefighter Injured in Water Tender Rollover
An East Contra Costa Fire Protection District firefighter was treated at a hospital and released after the tanker he was driving rolled over during a fire call.
September 08, 2021 By George Kelly – Source East Bay Times
Sep. 8—OAKLEY, CA — An East Contra Costa fire district firefighter injured during his truck’s rollover Tuesday during a grass-fire response has been released from a hospital, authorities said.
Just after 1 p.m., firefighters responded to the 2400 block of East Cypress Road east of O’Hara Avenue for a reported structure fire and arrived aboard multiple trucks and engines to find two abandoned outbuildings and an estimated half-acre of trash-strewn dry grass on fire, an East Contra Costa fire battalion chief said.
About 20 minutes into the response, a water truck driven by a firefighter managed to roll onto its roof, and fellow firefighters responded by working to free him while calling for an air ambulance that was later canceled. The injured firefighter was taken by ground ambulance for treatment of minor injuries before his release Tuesday evening.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1435349273046970368&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fmanage.firehouse.com%2Fcontent%2Fedit%2Fnews%2F21237373&sessionId=a004787b3677e1f4688cfe5a8fa69835fdbf80b3&theme=light&widgetsVersion=1890d59c%3A1627936082797&width=550px
Other firefighters, including responding Contra Costa fire district firefighters, helped to extinguish flames while a hazardous-materials crew worked to ensure minimal fuel-spill loss from the water truck, which suffered major damage and was later towed to a contracted yard. There were no other reported injuries.
The fire’s preliminary cause appeared to be grinding metal in dry grass, a battalion chief said. Oakley police also responded, and will assist East Contra Costa fire district staff in an investigation.
(c)2021 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)
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