Henderson, NV, the city I live in, has a pretty nice fire department, if they say so, themselves. I know they are well trained and professional and very, very well paid, from the rookie firefighter to the Fire Chief. Henderson has about 276,000 people in about 102 square miles. Henderson has 13 chiefs (Battalion to Chief) and 185 firefighters. They have 9 fire stations across Henderson.
Well, just how busy is the Henderson fire department?
In 2010, they responded to 586 actual fires, or about 1 and half fires a day.
http://www.cityofhenderson.com/fire/docs/2010_Annual_Response_Report_Final.pdf
They also responded to 568 false alarms and 203 other alarms including hazardous materials, wires down and mutual aid.
this comes to 1357 calls that an engine, truck or heavy rescue would go to.
This comes to 3.7 calls a day, divided up between 9 fire stations.
They also had 4,401 BS calls or animal rescues, smoke scares from grandma smoking behind the house, getting locked out their homes or cars etc. This adds another 12 calls a day, divided by 9 fire stations. Basically, on average, each station gets 1 or 2 calls a day for the engine and/or truck. Engine 86, Heavy Rescue 82 (only 42 calls), Battalion 8, Battalion 9 and Truck 98 all averaged less than 1 call a day. Truck 82 only had 397 calls in the year.
In 2010, in District 86 responded to a total of 1 structure fire and 1 other fire. They also responded to 76 ambulance calls in the District.
The EMS/ambulance section is quite busy, though. They went on 16,453 calls in 2010 or about 45 calls a day. There are 7 ambulances in Henderson, so this comes out to about 6 ambulance calls per ambulance. Total, between all ambulance, rescue and fire calls, each station goes on 7-8 calls a day. This is not a very busy fire department and this cannot be argued.
If you break it down even further, from the report, some engines and trucks averaged less than 1 call a day.
The point of this post is that the Henderson Fire Department just is not that busy of a fire department. Does this mean that we could go to a volunteer department? Of course not. Does it mean that the Fire department is overworked? Hardly. Does it mean that we could reduce the number of employees of the department? Probably. You could eliminate a battalion chief position, which is 3 very high paying positions and not see much of a difference. I would also hope that the Heavy Rescue truck is crossed staffed with other trucks or engines in their station.
Bottom line is that the Henderson Fire Department is a good fire department, but they are not a very busy fire department. When you break down the number of runs per truck/engine/ambulance they are not any busier than an above average volunteer fire department or private EMS unit in Clark County.
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ReplyDeleteI'm interested in this topic and it was being discussed a bit elsewhere, so I thought I'd do us the favor of starting a thread on it.
As some have noticed and others have mentioned, firefighters in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) make a lot of money - at least, it surprised me. Here, 65 of the top 100 highest paid county employees are firefighters. While some have suggested, rightly, that anyone who puts their life on the line for others deserves to be compensated, perhaps at a higher rate, at some point it becomes too much. Here, the average salary for all firefighters is over $100k.
At McCarran (the airport), several firefighters made more than the airport's manager. Some make twice as much as the district attorney and Sheriff. A few years ago, one firefighter pulled in $600,000. In 2003, one Batallion Chief made $493,000. 285 firefighters (more than half) are making more than $100k. Currently, Clark county is facing a $200 million budget shortfall.
It seems odd that salaries could get this outrageous without someone noticing before now. But in Clark County, the story is not just about salaries, its told in the over time and vacation pay. Some of these firefighters are earing $90k-$100k in overtime, in addition to their $100k+ salaries. One dude earned $98k in overtime, in addition to his $232k base pay.
As one of the recent articles in Las Vegas points out, with all this overtime pay, Clark County must be a smoldering pile of rubble by now. But in reality, very few fires are being fought. The majority of all calls to the FD are medical emergencies. Often, according to an "anonymous source," the ambulances often call the FD to let them know they aren't needed, but the FD responds anyway.
The scandal around here has been not about overtime pay itself, but how that overtime is reached. For example, if a firefighter calls in sick, another one is called in to replace him. The replacement will be paid overtime wages for that work. As I understand it, firefighters in Las Vegas call in sick more than twice as often as the rest of the county employees. They've set up a system where they sort of take turns calling in sick so that each of them can maximize the number of overtime days. The days they call in sick are made up when they get called in for an "extra" shift later on, and in the meantime they are being compensated at 1.5x their normal rate while still working their normal hours (and sometimes less than normal hours).
I'm hoping some of this recent exposure in Las Vegas will put pressure on the FD to reduce this practice, but my little experience with Clark County government scandal suggests that it either won't stop at all or it will just pick back up when the headlines die down.
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