John Skinner has fired off a letter to the county commission outling the adverse impact such a move would have on the community and the department.
Skinner reminded commissioners that the department is already understaffed, according to national standards, adding, "we also must NOT close any of the existing fire stations or layoff any personnel in order to provide this service and move forward."
The full text of his letter is posted below:
To:Barrow County Board of Commissioners
From:John W. Skinner, Interim Chief
Date:August 6, 2010
REF:Barrow County Emergency Services
I know that each of you has some tough decisions to make in the near future regarding the county's budget. I also understand that you must look at every option in order to balance a budget while maintaining and ensuring the county still provides the "necessary services". On August 5, 2010 I received numerous phone calls from within our department questioning the closing of a fire station and possible lay-offs of our staff. I for one am completely against this proposal and would like to enlighten each of you on the effects this will have to our citizens, community, businesses, and our department.
The closing of a fire station would place unnecessary risk to our citizen's safety. This would cause a decrease in our response times, delaying time that we could be saving a citizen's life and saving their personnel property. Just for thought, a fire will double in size every 30-60 seconds. Time is crucial in medical as well; studies have shown that if CPR is initiated within 4 minutes the survival rate doubles. The same study states that survival rates decreases by 5.5% with every minute that passes without any treatment. These factors are the reason that it is imperative to provide public safety to the citizens of this county. I would also like to give you a little call history of our department since 2007-to-present.
In 2007 we responded to a total 3631 incidents within the county; all handled by 6 stations. In 2008 we responded to a total of 3942 incidents within the county. In 2009 we responded to a total 5046 incidents within the county, and to date today we have answered 3487 incidents within the county, this is excluding the responses into the City of Winder. At this rate, we will be near 7000 incidents answered by the Emergency Services Department within the county. This equals a 48% increase from 2007 to 2010 in our incident call volume. With this information at hand, do we really want to consider this option of closing a station and lay-offs?
I know each of you is aware of the ISO rating system. With the closing of a fire station and possible lay-offs to the Emergency Services staff, this could possibly create an increase in our current ISO rating (5/9) and could double and even in some cases triple the amount a citizen will pay in insurance premiums. In extreme cases, some insurance companies will cancel the policy due to a high ISO rating. You as commissioners will also have to look at the impact this will have on commercial properties and business within the county. A 9/10 ISO rating will not assist the county in an economic turn around which we are in need of. So once again, it is imperative that we maintain our public safety departments, in the best interest of our sixty three plus thousand citizens who count on us daily.
Firefighter safety is another major factor that must be consider when you look at closing a station and reduction in force. We may be years away, if ever from meeting the NFPA standard for staffing. It is still our goal to continue to strive to achieve this. With reducing our staff and closing a station this will reflect on our response times, the efforts made by our professional staff in the field to mitigate incidents, and most importantly will compromise our firefighter's safety. Fireground effectiveness will be compromised if we fall below our current minimum staffing levels, which is well below any standard today.
As stated earlier in paragraph 1, we have seen the demand for our service increase by 48% within 3 years. The closing of a station and a possible reduction in force would be detrimental to our citizens, department, and the county. It would, without a doubt, compromise the safety of our personnel trying to keep up with the demand of our services.
I would like the opportunity to discuss this "option" in more detail with each of you in the future if this is still being considered by the Board of Commissioners. Our department has been through some tough times within the past year and it has tremendously hurt the moral of the department, retention of employees and recruitment of new employees when needed. We as a department have made it our immediate goal to get our department back on its feet as well as striving to provide the best possible service to our citizens. This will require support from the Board to do so, and a permanent Chief to be in place to carry this department to the next level. We also must NOT close any of the existing fire stations or layoff any personnel in order to provide this service and move forward.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2010/8/231347