Bill Groth is antsy.
Foot surgery has put the veteran Inver Grove Heights firefighter on light duty, which means he can’t go on calls.
“That’s been tough,” he said.
Consider that last year, Groth responded to 706 of the department’s 1,229 fire, medical and rescue calls.
“When you’re a paid on-call firefighter, you want to help people,” said Groth, a 57-year-old retired postal worker, when asked to explain his call total, which was tops in the department. “You want to make as many of the calls as you can.”
Bum foot or not, Groth’s call volume would have dropped this year either way — and he’s OK with that.
In January, the fire department switched to a “duty crew” service model, which means that three paid on-call firefighters are at the station in shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It replaces the traditional system in which the firefighters came to the station after their pagers went off.
“I think this should have come a long time ago,” Groth said at the end of a shift on a recent weekday. “It’s just a win-win for the community.”
Fire chiefs who are using the duty-crew approach say it reduces response times and helps recruit and retain firefighters — all things that many departments have struggled with in recent years. And it can be done without significant increases to the budget.
Duty crews are not new. Roseville was among the first cities to try them, in the 1970s with an overnight crew. It added daytime crews in 2001 and went to a full 24 hours three years later.
Although more and more departments in Minnesota and nationwide are heading in this direction, it still is not the norm, said Judy Thill, fire chief in Inver Grove Heights.
While paying for duty crews does cost more than relying on firefighters to respond to pagers, it is still a fraction of the cost of staffing full-time career firefighters — up to $100,000 each.
Thill requested an extra $72,000 in this year’s payroll budget for anticipated costs — mainly for staffing the firefighters at the $12.50 hourly rate. So far, the cost has been about $5,000 a month.
“We have 65 firefighters and not everybody was excited at first,” she said. “But now they seem to embrace it.”
HOW IT WORKS
Having three firefighters at one of Inver Grove Heights’ two stations at all hours of the day means quicker response times, Thill said.
“Right now we can be on scene helping the citizen where before we wouldn’t have even been to the station yet,” said firefighter Groth. “Fires double every minute, so if we can shave off seven, eight, nine minutes, we can save property.”
While three firefighters on duty is not enough for every emergency, chief Thill said, they can handle most calls — routine things like smoke alarms or carbon monoxide detectors going off, and some medical calls.
Now, extra firefighters are paged only for large calls. During the first three months of duty crews, only about 30 percent of the department’s calls required paging additional firefighters.
Another advantage to the duty-crew system is that firefighters can train, perform station duties, and take fire and medical certification exams in their spare time during their shifts, Thill said.
And while firefighters work about the same number of hours a month as they did with the pager model, they now can schedule their four-hour shifts ahead of time.
Not knowing when he would be called to duty was a big reason Dennis Suchy decided to wait until 2011 to join the fire department. He wanted his two kids to be older.
“It would have been too much running away from the dinner table,” he said.
Suchy and fellow firefighter Mark Simmonds said they prefer duty-crew shifts. Simmonds, who joined the department after the switchover, is also a full-time Minneapolis firefighter and needs to know when he can sign up to work for Inver Grove.
“I was never a part of the strictly on-call thing, but I was never a fan of it,” he said. “I have a couple of buddies who are volunteers other places and they don’t like how they’re tied to their pagers, because their pager is going off all the time. Here it goes off 12 times a month, at best.”
OTHER CITIES
Lakeville is another metro-area city that recently switched to paid duty crews during weekdays — a time when typically it is harder to find help. It is already paying off, Fire Chief Mike Meyer said.
“We’re at about three and a half minutes during the duty crew shift,” Meyer said. “Prior to that, we were looking at eight minute response times, which are typical for paid on-call fire departments.”
Meanwhile, the daytime crew has been able to handle most of the calls themselves. From October through March, extra firefighters were called for just 34 of the 179 calls.
The Lake Johanna Fire Department, which covers Arden Hills, North Oaks and Shoreview, has had duty crews in one form or another for six years — first during the day, then also weekend evenings. In July, the department went to duty crews 24/7 at two of its stations.
“It was less than ideal doing it over six years, but it was paced because we didn’t want to break the budget all at once,” Fire Chief Tim Boehlke said. “We started it during tough economic times.”
The change has meant quicker response times, and nearly all the firefighters have stayed with the department.
“I honestly think this provides a much superior service delivery, and makes better use of our firefighters’ time,” he said.
Groth, the retired postal worker with the bum foot, is enjoying the camaraderie around the fire station — something that was missing with the pager model.
“You get to know these guys now because you’re with them for four hours, where before it was hit or miss,” he said.
Dan Bernardy, who like Groth has been an Inver Grove firefighter for 29 years, has noticed attitudes have changed for the better.
“What chief Thill has created with this is a group of people who want to do more,” he said.