By CHRIS LINDAHL
@cmlindahl
Daily Hampshire Gazette
SOUTHAMPTON — Fire Chief John Workman wants to expand fire and medical call coverage in town, staffing the fire station with firefighters for an extra eight hours per day — though at a cost to taxpayers.
Town Meeting voters on Tuesday will decide whether they want to see a second shift added at the Fire Department at an annual cost of $135,000. If the funding is approved at Town Meeting, a special town election will ask voters to approve a Proposition 2½ override before July 1 to finalize the spending.
Town officials estimate the override would raise the property tax rate 21 cents per thousand in a permanent increase, adding $55 to the annual tax bill for a single-family home valued at $260,000 — the town’s average for 2014, according to state data.
The station is now staffed by firefighters, who are also EMTs or paramedics, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. The department functions on a standby basis during the evening and overnight hours, Workman said, with firefighters responding to calls from their homes.
Officials are seeking the override vote to fund the proposed increase to the Fire Department’s annual budget to restructure on-duty shifts to cover all hours but 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Workman’s proposal to add a second shift would have firefighters based in the fire station from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Workman estimates the new staffing plan would mean firefighters would respond to nearly 82 percent of calls directly from the fire station.
Firefighters responding to calls during the standby shift must drive from their homes to the fire station and then drive the ambulance or fire truck to the location of the call. Because some firefighters live as far as 7 minutes away from the station, adding a second shift would mean response times in some cases would drop by as much as 7 minutes, Workman said.
The shift restructuring is a move to fulfill a 2013 agreement between the state and Select Board that requires Southampton to maintain paramedic-level emergency medical response 24 hours per day, seven days a week.
Paramedics are emergency response personnel who have gone through additional training that certifies them to perform advanced medical procedures. A paramedic, not an EMT, must answer emergency calls that suggest a patient may be going into cardiac arrest, for example.
The move from “basic-level” to “professional-level” paramedic service is something that Workman has been focused on since being hired as chief in 2013, he said. The Fire Department is made up of 27 part-time firefighters; 12 are paramedics and 12 are basic-level EMTs.
Reliance on standby shifts means that there are sometimes gaps in coverage, Workman said.
One such case came last month, when Ted Blais of Old Country Road raised concerns that Westfield firefighters — and not firefighters from Southampton — responded to a 911 call summoning help for his father.
The 911 call made by Blais’ mother was answered by a Southampton dispatcher at 7:57 p.m. on April 8. She requested an ambulance to her home on Valley Road because her 76-year-old husband was going in and out of consciousness, according to dispatch records.
Emergency calls at night are typically answered by two or three Southampton firefighters who had previously committed to the standby shift that runs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. On April 8, however, no firefighters had signed up for that shift, Workman said.
While it is rare that no one is available to cover a standby shift, that can happen when all 27 part-time members of the Fire Department are working their second jobs or have another commitment, according to Workman.
Because nobody was on standby that night, the dispatcher immediately attempted to reach any available Southampton firefighters by sending a tone to their handheld radios.
When no members of the department answered, the dispatcher passed the call along to the Westfield Fire Department at 8:01 p.m. — a protocol dictated by a mutual aid agreement, Workman said.
Two Southampton police officers arrived at the Valley Road home at about 8:04 p.m., according to Police Chief David G. Silvernail. A Westfield ambulance followed at 8:12 p.m., Workman said.
All of the town’s police cruisers are equipped with defibrillators; some of the officers are also trained as EMTs and are able to take a patient’s vital signs and offer preliminary treatment, Workman said.
Silvernail said though all of his officers are certified emergency first responders, neither of the officers who responded to the April 8 call was an EMT.
Not having standby coverage on April 8 is just a symptom of a larger problem, Workman said.
“Because working here in Southampton is a part-time job, (firefighters) have to have another part-time job” in order to make enough money and potentially get benefits, Workman said. “That’s part of the problem right now.”
Firefighters cannot be scheduled at their other job in order to sign up for the standby shift, Workman said, adding, “or at least they have to be able to leave at a moment’s notice.”
Workman added that even if the April 8 call had been answered by a members of the Southampton Fire Department, the response time might have been even longer than it took Westfield to respond.
“Worst-case scenario, you could have someone coming from the other side of town to the station, which is 7 minutes before they get in the ambulance and drive to the scene,” he said.
The fire station is 2.5 miles from Southampton’s northern border with Easthampton, and about 3 miles from the southern border with Westfield.
The Blais residence is about 2.8 miles from the fire station via Route 10.
In addition to the occasions when no firefighters have signed up for standby shifts, there are three hours each day not covered by any shift, even with a fully staffed schedule. Those gaps are between 5 and 6 p.m. and 6 and 8 a.m.
Silvernail stressed that Southampton dispatchers are trained and certified in handling emergency calls. That means they triage all emergency calls that they answer “in order to dispatch the appropriate emergency response and then stay on the line with the caller to provide emergency medical advice in accordance with established guidelines while the emergency personnel are responding to the call,” he said.
During emergency calls, dispatchers determine whether a person needs basic- or paramedic-level (ALS) service. And in many communities, that’s typically when Westfield steps in.
“Westfield does mutual aid calls because we’re an ALS service and a lot of the Hilltowns around us don’t have ALS service and they don’t have full-time stations,” Westfield Fire Chief Mary Regan said.
While most Hampden County communities respond to one or two mutual aid calls each month, Regan said Westfield typically responds to about 40, due to its location.
“We’re not surrounded by full-time departments,” she said. “We pick up that load.”
If the proposed $135,00 Proposition 2½ override passes at Tuesday’s Town Meeting and is then approved by voters at a special town election, the annual increase in the Fire Department’s budget will restructure staffing at the station to create two shifts each staffed by two firefighters — one from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and another from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., Workman said.
The change would mean the overnight standby shift would run only 8 hours, compared to the current 12, making it easier for firefighters to commit to the standby shift. Currently, firefighters on the standby shift are paid $50 for signing up. They are then paid an hourly rate only when responding to calls, Workman said.
Workman expects that the shift restructuring would mean that nearly 82 percent of all emergency calls in Southampton would be answered by firefighters from the fire station, based on data from the last 13 months:
About 51 percent of emergency calls came during the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daytime shift.
About 39 percent of emergency calls during that period came in during the standby shift from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.; around 10 percent came between 6 and 8 a.m. or 5 and 6 p.m.
In order to fill the second shift, Workman said he hopes to hire five new part-time firefighters.
The decision by town officials to itemize override requests is different from last year, when the budget presented at Town Meeting required an override in order to be balanced.
“This puts the decisions in the voters’ hands,” said Town Administrator Heather Budrewicz, adding that it allows voters to answer the question, “what do you want, what don’t you want?”
“Each community needs to make the difficult decisions about what is the appropriate level of (fire and EMS protection) and what it will cost to make that happen,” said Jennifer Mieth, spokeswoman for the Office of the State Fire Marshal.
Should the override be approved, the second shift will begin July 1, Workman said.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at [email protected].
