Town Council workshop hears fire department on staffing, response times and mutual aid

The Town Council held a workshop Feb. 10 with Cumberland Fire Department leaders to review the department's operations, call trends and staffing needs.

Fire department leaders told the council the department handled roughly 1,400 emergency calls in the last reported year and that concurrent incidents occur frequently, straining available crews. "We have two incidents going on at the same time about 27–28 percent of the time," said Andy Turicotte, deputy chief and firefighter-paramedic. He and Gerald Croce, a firefighter-EMT, walked through how those simultaneous calls and increased transports have affected service.

The department described its call mix as more heavily weighted to emergency medical services than structure fires, noting the community lacks large institutional facilities that other towns serve. "We are more EMS than fire," Turicotte said, explaining that many calls are emergency medical transports, lift assists and non-structure incidents. He identified a roughly 200-call increase year-over-year compared with the prior calendar year.

Nut graf: Fire leaders said limited full-time staffing, geography and frequent mutual-aid responses are preventing the department from meeting its response-time goals for high-acuity calls — and that the town should consider staged staffing increases and other options to close the gap.

Most urgent details: department leaders said their goal is average arrival within about seven minutes for priority emergency calls, but that the actual average response time they measured was about nine minutes; including mutual-aid responses pushes that average higher, to roughly 13 minutes. "When we look at the data a couple of weeks ago, we were just under nine minutes. When we look at mutual aid coming in, that jumps it up to about 13 minutes," Turicotte said. He warned that minutes matter for cardiac arrest, stroke and trauma calls.

Staffing and coverage: speakers described current shift staffing as a mix of two- and three-person shifts (two shifts with two people; two shifts with three people) after two full-time positions were added last year. The department said adding per-diem staff and better daytime coverage would be an intermediate step; leaders said a longer-term target would be four full-time personnel per shift as an interim objective and six per shift as a longer-term goal to reduce reliance on mutual aid and cross-staffing. "If we can get to four on a shift right now, that buys us time. Ideally, within the next three to five years, we should be close to six," Turicotte said.

Mutual aid and high-speed highways: the department said it routinely sends and receives automatic aid on major highways including I‑95 and the Turnpike, and that the bulk of motor-vehicle accidents have occurred on higher-speed roads. "The Main Turnpike is probably your worst danger zone other than 295," a presenter said, describing multiple heavy-extrication calls on those routes. Mutual-aid contacts were described as roughly one call per day in the recent reporting period; on some days neighboring departments arrive first because of station locations.

Billing and revenue: the department said the town contracts with a medical-reimbursement service for EMS billing, pays that vendor roughly 6 percent of collections, and that the town received approximately $250,000 in EMS billing revenue in the period discussed. The department said it does not pursue billing for responding to fire alarm soundings because administrative costs and uncollectible amounts made prior efforts unsuccessful.

Risk and operational constraints: fire leaders summarized that certain operations require minimum staffing (for example, interior firefighting or IDLH — immediately dangerous to life and health — entries) and that those minimums are rarely met without mutual aid. "Before we can enter that space, we have to have the two-in/two-out — right now it's very rare that we can meet those standards within a reasonable period of time," Turicotte said.

Other details and community impacts: presenters reviewed false-alarm policies (the town ordinance imposes escalating fees for repeated false alarms), the limitations of nonemergency patient transport in neighboring towns due to reimbursement and staffing, the department's training activities (including ice-rescue and extrication), and the value of the volunteer/call company in expanding coverage. They said geography — long travel distances to some neighborhoods — and simultaneous calls are the largest drivers of response delays.

Council follow-up and next steps: presenters recommended a two-track approach: near-term moves such as per-diem staffing and stronger daytime coverage, and a long-term staffing strategy aimed at increasing full-time persons per shift to allow a reliably staffed second ambulance and a staffed engine for fire response. Turicotte said the department would submit more detailed cost and staffing scenarios for council consideration during budget season.

Ending: Council members asked for additional breakdowns — including better data on false-alarm causes, the distribution of accidents by roadway and worst-case budget scenarios if many residents enroll in proposed tax-relief programs — and said staff would bring more detailed cost and impact estimates back to the council during the budget process.