 What are you putting down for Geshe? Ann's here. No, no, excuse me. Oh, I'm sorry. Ann made it. Who wants to vote for Geshe? I'm excused. All right. Did he call you? Second. Yeah, nobody called you. Okay. State of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That's okay. So moved. Any discussion? So Jane will be on top of the fire tower. I guess. I guess someone here. Last one here. Last one here. Last one here. Last one here. Motion to second. In the session, no opinions. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, Chief Herman is equal. There you are. Okay. He had asked for this presentation in our last committee, the whole meeting, but we had too many things on the agenda. And I think the nature of this meeting stands by itself. This will be at this. We won't be taking any other topics other than this fire demonstration. So I guess we have to be inside and outside, right? Yeah. Inside and outside. Thank you. Thank you, Chairperson Clayunas, members of the committee, the whole members of the media and guests. Welcome to our headquarters fire station. I'm not going to speak a whole lot tonight. We have a lot to get through. The reason that we've put this together is we wanted to show you what we do, how we do it, and how many people it actually takes to accomplish those things. In the fire service, we're really based on risk management. And we do a, spend a lot of time charting how many times we get multiple calls at once, how big our responses are, how big the buildings are, how we respond to, how big the fires are. And really the city has decided that they have funded their fire department to handle residential fires. We can handle a fire in a ranch home or a two-story home very well with the manpower that we have. As you saw at the fire last Saturday night on A Street, that really taxes our resources, and we need to call health front of volunteers to help us contain those. And when you look at risk management, if you look at a fire like a landmark fire, Prangies, Stoney, those happen every eight to ten years. There is no way that a city our size could fund a fire department to have the resources to put those fires out. You'd have to have a hundred firefighters on duty every day, and it just doesn't make sense. So that's why our department is sized the way we are. And the normal fire we have is a residential fire. Tonight's scenario that we're going to present to you really utilizes all the resources that we have on duty during the day, and that is at the staffing level that we were at last year. The reason we're still at that staffing level being six people short is right now we don't have anybody on vacation during these periods of the year. Once April or May comes, the people that you're going to see respond to this fire exercise out here tonight will be too short because once we start having vacations, those people just aren't going to be here. That's why it's important that I... Chief, how many firefighters do you have now? Actual men? Actual men on the rigs we have right now are 63. So divided by three shifts, that's 21 a shift. We allow four people out on vacation at a time, so that drops us down to 17 for more than half of the year when people are on vacation. The exercise that we're going to perform for you tonight, we will be utilizing every station which is typical to the way we would respond to a house fire. The Southside 18th Street Station has a fire engine with two people on it, an officer and a driver, and a med unit with two firefighter paramedics. The Downtown Fire Station has a pumper and a rescue truck. They both have an officer on it and a driver. The Northside Fire Station on 15th and Main has a fire engine with an officer and a driver, and a med unit with two firefighter paramedics. And the station that we are at here has a ladder truck with two fire... an officer and a driver, and a med unit with two firefighters. The new station on Southside 18th Street has a fire engine with two firefighters on it. During our exercise, which would be normal for us, that unit will relocate to station one. That is going to be the only unit that is left in service once we deploy all of the other units for the exercise. So we will put him central in case another call comes in and that would be the only unit left to respond to that. What we have set up as an exercise tonight will be something that would occur at 2 a.m. in the morning, which is very typical for our residential fires. It's set up that a neighbor has just arrived home from work. He sees smoke coming from his neighbor's home on the second floor and the residence is located on 25th Street here. And that male party, and he knows that a male party lives upstairs but he doesn't know if he's home, his car is outside. So then that neighbor does place that 911 telephone call. To that call, we will have 15 firefighting personnel respond. 14 firefighters and one shift commander. The people that you're going to see outside with yellow helmets on are the captains and lieutenants that are normally on the fire rigs. The firefighters with the orange and yellow traffic vests are going to be your firefighter paramedics that are on the rigs or on the fire on the ambulances. And it's important to remember that all firefighting crews always work in tubes. Nobody ever works by themselves. That's set up so that you have a partner that always knows where you are. If this was a real incident, we would be responding here with 28 vehicles. For tonight's exercise, we're only going to have five because I had to leave the crews in the station. All the people that are putting this exercise on for you tonight volunteered for this and they are all off-duty people. In any fire that we go to, our priorities are the same and they're in the same order. Whether it's a business, factory, or residence. The first thing we are concerned with is rescue. Is anybody inside? Our second is exposures. We're going to make sure that wherever the fire is, it doesn't spread to more of the building it's in or to buildings next door. The third thing is we want to confine the fire to where it is and we want to extinguish it there. And then after that is overhaul, which means we're not trying to damage any more of the building than is already involved. As we go through, we're also salvaging the people's private property or the building. And then we also need to do ventilation, which is very critical. While you're outside tonight, there will be firefighters standing amongst you with radios on. So if you have any questions on what's going on, you're going to hear the actual radio transmissions of what we're doing. So if you have any questions of what they're doing, feel free to ask them. We're going to show you a quick film here first before we go out. It's a little bit of an old film. We've been showing it in the schools for probably the last 20 to 25 years, but it's still very pertinent to how fires start, how fast they progress, what they look like when we actually arrive on scene. And I know a lot of times when we talk, I always say that fire is double in size every two minutes. You're going to be able to see that in this film very evidently. You're going to see the visibility that we are accustomed to working in when we pull up to a fire. And it's going to talk about the heat that we're working in and why it's so important to have somebody ventilating the building as we're trying to get in. Breathing inside this building would be impossible because of the heat and the gases. And as the exercise we're going to put on for you tonight, we're going to use theatrical smoke, but there will be real smoke out there. And if all our cameras and everything work, you'll be able to see what the firefighters are seeing as they're crawling through. We have not told the firefighters exactly what they're going to find tonight, just like it would be in a regular house fire. They do know they're pulling up to a two-story building that has a fire on the second floor. Other than that, they do not know anything else. So we'll run the film for you quick, and then we'll proceed to the outside to our exercises. The M-B-Z talked about with the camera, our actual images broadcast from their thermal imaging camera that the initial attack crew was carrying. They'll be able to see what they see when they look through their camera. It'll look like it's wide open, but it's actually the visibility is zero in there. In a typical residential fire, what is your response coming from? The moment you get the call here, do you have to... It's very parallel to the ambulance response about three minutes. Everything we do outside is going to be our normal response. We're going to place a 911 call which is going to take about 30 seconds. Dispatching us takes us maybe another half a minute to get into the fire truck and go. And then we're going to use a three-minute response time for the first arriving unit. And then after that, it's typically about a minute or two minutes as the remaining units arrive on scene. Everything will be in real time outside, so you're going to see how long it actually takes. But the film actually shows you how that fire has grown from the time it started to the 911 call is placed if it is placed timely until we get there and what we see when we get inside. Power can do to a home. A carelessly discarded cigarette is the cause of this fire, but home fires can start many ways. Space heaters, wood stoves, faulty electrical equipment, and cooking, among others. In most fires, there is a longer period of time from the appearance of smoke to actual flames. Remember, what you will see and hear was filmed as it actually happened. Don't know how we believe the fire on the street started. 30 seconds from first flame, the sofa ignites. From this point, fire grows rapidly. If you discover a fire, leave immediately and call the fire department for 20 seconds from first flame. Polyurethane cushioning from the couch starts to melt, spreading fire to the rug. Smoke begins to fill the room. One minute 23 seconds, the stairway to upstairs still clear. Things look safe here but downstairs the fire continues to accelerate. One minute 35 seconds, the smoke layer in the living room descends rapidly. Gases flowing out of this room now exceed 190 degrees Fahrenheit. One minute 47 seconds, light smoke begins to move to the second floor. One minute 50 seconds, the smoke detector at the foot of the stair sounds at a alarm, providing warning before exits are blocked. We would open a test case in the area now of the 911. The air is clean. Two minutes 30 seconds, the temperature above the couch is now 400 degrees Fahrenheit. That's over 200 degrees Celsius. Two minutes 48 seconds, the floor is into the dining room. Now only four feet above the floor, thick black smoke moves rapidly upstairs. Three minutes 3 seconds, melted polyurethane burns under the couch, suddenly the lamp shade at night. The temperature of three feet above the floor in this room is over 500 degrees Fahrenheit. No one could survive. Three minutes 20 seconds, the upstairs hall is beginning with black-acted smoke making escape more difficult. From the outside, there may be no evidence of the inferno inside. Three minutes 41 seconds, the energy in the room suddenly ignites everything. Within one minute, the temperature has risen to over 1400 degrees. The living room windows break out. The entire room fills with flames, forcing huge amounts of smoke and toxic gases throughout the house. Only two minutes after the smoke detector sounded, the lower hallway is dark and filled with smoke. The upstairs hall is now passable. A second escape room is your only way out. Four minutes 33 seconds. Only now are flames visible from outside the house. If this fire occurred at night when most fatal fires happened, this would be the first exterior evidence of some fire in progress. Flames climb up the outside of the house entering the guest room window. Fire grows so fast that the fire department may not be able to rescue anyone trapped inside. Firefighters wearing protective clothing enter to search the house and to combat the fire causing steam to pour out of the first floor. Reaching the second floor, firefighters brick windows to release heat and vent smoke calls to check for fire spread. Like this one, some will move slower, some faster. But if the fire starts in your home, get out immediately and stay out. You have just seen the power of an uncontrolled fire. Questions will proceed outside and minus the actual fire will show you what it takes to put that out. Typically, what kills the people? It's typically the smoke and the heated gases. It's not the flames. Please. I have a good question. It's at 14 degrees. Does that make that building very susceptible to collapsing at 1400 degrees? It's an interesting question that is really becoming more and more relevant. In this style home, with the time period that you saw here, we're still okay. In the newer, lighter weight construction homes that we're dealing with now, I think they were less than 15 minutes into the fire and they went through the floor. The reason I'm asking that, sir, is that last night, they were investigating a 9-11 terrorist attack on the building. They ran a test on the project fuel, an I-beam, an I-beam, and it showed that this beam would supposedly go up to about 2000. At 1400 degrees, this thing started burning and all of a sudden it collapsed. They showed that's what happened to this building. That's really what I'm asking this. It's something that we deal with and it's something that the incident commander is timing as we're there, trying to figure out how long it has been since this fire started, the one we're in there. We know the construction of the homes and the cities. If you're in the middle of the city, we're not dealing with trust construction, which fails if we have a solid 2x6, 2x8, 2x10, the same amount of floor joist. We've got pretty much time, 20 minutes, half hour before that is going to burn all the way through and collapse. If we're dealing with lightweight construction, it's much less than that. It's something we have to be aware of. In the video we mentioned, the fire at that point was fairly small, but it still recommends get out, call the fire department. Do you find that a lot of people say that it's okay that they can try go grab a fire extinguisher rather than calling you right away and that kind of lengthens your response time because they're not making that call right away? That's a very typical occurrence. That's what we believe happened on A Street and it's something that we run into a lot. Obviously strongly. In the school programs, we always tell the kids call 911 first from somewhere outside. Don't go back in and don't try to extinguish it yourself. It's because nine times out of ten they can't put it out. After the demonstration is completed we can come back up here if you have any other questions and ask them where to run. As long as everybody is assembled our firefighter Cal Hughes is going to place the 911 call to our actual dispatcher. She will dispatch it on one of our spare channels and then from there we'll just be doing the talking without dispatch. This is a real one. That was weird. Let's just give it a couple minutes. We're going to have to give her a couple seconds here to visit for a few minutes and just make sure everybody is on channel three. Yeah, channel three. As soon as they go and route then call her. Okay. How many seconds was that? Time of call until they got on the road. Cal, go ahead. Scenario. Okay, I just came home and there is a there appears to be my neighbor's house appears to be on fire. It's the go ahead what? 1326, it's the house behind 26 North 25th Street. One person lives upstairs but I'm not positive if he's home and off. My phone number? Okay, I'll try to see if I can get a hold of anybody. Thank you. Thank you, bye. Ask for additional units because it sounds like a working fire. First dispatch would only send two of our stations. This brings the other two for a four total. That's a second alarm coming in and we have a working fire. So you can see there was about a minute's time there between the 911 call going in and her being able to dispatch. If you made the 911 call, this is horrible. The stations know which ones are supposed to go. That's why she'll say an area and then we know, we pre-planned which stations go. But in a fire like this where they hear it's actually their smoke visible, they're getting into trucks and they're ready to go because they know they're going to begin. They'll get that second alarm where they know they're going to have to respond. Okay, so in this case, we had one vector. A scenario we had two, three vectors. In that scenario, you almost have to completely shut down fighting the fire. Correct. That's where we go back to number one and get them out as safely as we possibly can. And these don't matter until we get them out. How long does your first team of player-players go on before you have to kind of alternate? There must be some sort of a time limit on that. Our bottles are 40-minute bottles now. 45-minute bottles now. They can normally go through that full tank before they come out. We used to have 20-minute bottles. They'd have to refill and go back. If you're in a tank of air in that heat, you've pretty much got to come out and sit for a minute. There must be a buzzer then that goes off and lets them know. We do it vibrates, actually. When it tells you when you get to 500 pounds of pressure, it vibrates. And that gives them about how much time? Another 10 minutes, roughly, right? Yeah. You can tell who's not on the line anymore. So you can see that original engine pulled up only had two people on it. The officer got out and walked around to see what was going on. That left the driver to pull that hose off. We still don't have enough people to go in until that next arriving unit comes. What happened Saturday night with the crowds? You got the bar unloaded outside of the street and you pull up with two firefighters. I guess I'll ask Firefighter Longmiller who was first on scene. I can tell you, we were first on scene and I was on rescue one and we pulled up with engine one. Two people who got there on two different rigs. Two on engine one, two on rescue one. We pull up officer on engine one. Captain Irish was already starting to do his size up, myself and I'm a driver on rescue one. I'm trying to get off while my officer's running to the stairwell. There's people yelling at us that there's people possibly trapped. Why aren't we getting water on the fire yet? Why aren't we entering the building and where is everybody else? And you've got four people. Fire, F.E.O. Ensley's pulling hose off but you still have to get the pump in the gear because it's so cold out. It's 10 degrees that night. So you can imagine what's going on while my officer's trying to look up the stairwell to the smoke that's already banking down where the apartments are. And yet we have all these people out there that night. I mean just hitting a bar night you had 30, 40 people already gathering on that corner watching us screaming, why aren't you doing anything? Firefighting standards say that a firefighter does not have to go into a building we go in in twos. Firefighters do not have to enter until the second twosome is there to pull them out. It's called our backup crew. They can go in on their own if they feel it's safe to perform a rescue. So it's a decision a firefighter has to make on scene if he does not have that backup line there behind him. Were there rescues that night? Well, myself and Lieutenant Colbeck made it to the top of the stairwell. And we made it to the top of the stairwell and started to traverse to go to look for the fire. The smoke had banked down so much and the heat was so intense that at that point, if there was a rescue it would have been, I mean, at that point the amount of heat and smoke. So we started to back down by that time then fire and flames were already over our head up there. But, you know, you remember, there was only two of us up there. One guy at the engine who was controlling the water and our officer. So effectively we didn't have anybody there yet but they would have gone through the floor when they got to the top. There was nobody there to pull them off. Speaking of the rescues, there was three bar patrons that went up. The lady in the front apartment, the grandmother had two children with her. One and a half and a seven-year-old. And the bar patrons helped her down. They actually carried one of the children, the youngest child. They carried her down the steps. She said she could feel the rail but she couldn't see where she was going at that point in the fire. But you had no idea that that was all people, right? No, yeah. Once these guys go up, I mean, outside is chaos and no one said anything that they got everyone out. It's organized chaos for the first few minutes and then you have to find out how many are possibly up there. If there's a fire, you have to rescue other people but what if those four would say, please rescue my pets. Is this yourself or five others to rescue pets? You know, we wouldn't go in especially for that but we've rescued many, many animals. Typically, animals do pretty good on a fire because they're low to the ground where the best air is. So we've pulled out many, many cats. I can put a sticker on this and say, don't save the cat. Yeah, you can. I think you can kind of see why it takes everybody that we have on duty and that's really the most critical part. At this time of the fire now, we're kind of pulling back and looking for extension in other parts of the building. We don't have a rescue anymore. We're trying to save as much property as we possibly can. If it's a fire that is out of control, we're just protecting the outside like at Landmark. We're protecting everything else that's around it. It's really the first 15 minutes that we need everybody. Let's say it's an industrial setting. Perfect example. I mean, you don't know chemicals. How are you going to hold the experts that know what's in there? Well, we do know chemicals because we do inspections in all these buildings. We have free plans. We have it written down. We have files that we can look at it. A lot of those buildings have fire protection systems, a sprinkler system that all the connection that we can hook up to. And once again, it's the firefighters on scene that make that decision. Can we safely get in there, hit that fire quickly and get it out? Or do we need to pull back and protect the exposures? In terms of responding to a fire like you would stage tonight with general alarm, knowing that there's visible smoke and flames when a truck arrives and you can see do you just approach the situation as a worst-case scenario and go from there? I mean, what's kind of the mindset when you show up? I mean, do you just have to take it as it comes and assess the situation as you go? That's a lot of factors. You're thinking time and date. This scenario was 2 a.m., vehicle outside. You assume that somebody's probably inside there. Middle of the afternoon, there's less of a chance, but you never assume. So yeah, we are always feeling a worst-case scenario. We're getting in there as quickly as we can. Our first thing, again, is we have to get in and see if anybody's inside. That's the first thing we determine on all floors of the building and its extinguishment. A typical, this fire in the city, we would have everybody deployed except one fire engine would be remaining in one of the houses. And a lot of times if it is a bad fire, we'll still bring them to the scene, but keep them available. So the two firefighters on that vehicle maybe help setting up a ladder, maybe help just pulling the hose up through the door, because a lot of times if we have to make turns, it's hooking, so we need somebody feeding that hose. So we can bring everybody to the scene, but leave people outside and leave them available for another call. Can you back that truck in? It's backed in. We're facing out. The people that are on that vehicle don't get dirty. It's what we call clean work. They're outside. They maybe will make the hydrogen, but they're doing something that the second call comes in, they got to go. And typically all of our med units would be deployed to a fire like this, all three. We probably would commit two of those firefighters paramedics to a hose line, which was what was done here, and we would try to keep the other two med units outside doing clean work How many firemen in this scenario have deployed out? How many firemen are sitting here in this building? Right now? There's four. There's four in every one of the stations. If you were out on call, how many would be left in this building? We'd say if they were at that fire. There's nobody. Typically there would be nobody in any of their stations unless we left one rig central. We would move it downtown and that's what we tried. If there are multiple fires, in the tracks of use, is there any reason to help? That's what we did on A Street. We call it Town of Cheboygan. Landmark fire, we call it Town of Cheboygan. Typically, anything that's bigger than a residence, downtown, factory, anything, we need to call for help. We can call in our off-duty people to come help us, but a lot of times we need more equipment. That's when we'll call the Town of Cheboygan or Town of Wilson. We've used coal or we've used City of Falls already. Likewise, we've gone out and helped Town of Cheboygan numerous times. Town of Wilson numerous times. It's a pretty quick call. Do you remember how long it took them to get there? I would say it was 26, 30 minutes. It's typically about 15, 20 minutes for them to get the call for them to get there. That's not bad. When you call for their assistance, they're not involved in a rescue because of the timeline. It won't be in a rescue, probably not even an offensive attack where you're trying to put it out. It's when it's around the drowned. That's when you call for that. It's typically at the one where we're trying to make sure this doesn't go somewhere else. They aren't going to be involved in the rescues or even putting it out without excessive damage. It's too late by then. Our surrounding communities all respond just like we would respond to their advice. We have what's called mutual late attacks with all our surrounding communities and there's no charge. We call them, they call us, we go. I think at the landmark fire, we melted off some of the lenses on Town of Cheboygan and we paid to replace those. It's just a great agreement. We helped them to help us. But in terms of, because of your size and personnel and more equipment you have just being bigger city, do they rely more on the city than you relying on Town of Cheboygan for instance? Or is it just because they don't have as many incidents? I think that's because they don't have as many calls as what we do. It's about half and half. It balances out. But I would say as we go into the future here and everything becomes more and more costly it doesn't make sense for all of us to have a 100 foot aerial ladder. The political parties at B are going to need to meet in the future and combine us. We need to share more and more resources to make this work. What are some of the unique pieces of equipment that some of the surrounding communities have that you don't have? Are there pieces that you had to use on Saturday? No, not on Saturday. There's tanker trucks. Brush buggies, grass fires, we'd have something evergreen. They do have a platform in the Town of Cheboygan which has the large platform on the end of the vehicle that we do not have and there's times where that's advantageous, you can reach out in the river dip it down and put people right in and lift them up with it. So they have some items, but not a lot. We do have the jaws of life where Town of Wilson does not, so we have an agreement where we cover up to Highway B for them. And we do have a confined space rescue equipment that we cover the entire county with nobody else has that equipment. Some of the trench rescue things we have, specialty rescue equipment, then we got the grant one. City of Falls actually has confined space, but they actually just call us the other day because they're having the same problem because tech rescue involves so many people with so much competency review, but they're having problems getting people like during the day and so they called us actually just this last week and said, hey, we want to get together with you hook up our people that we have see what you guys have, see what we have or we're constantly working on interoperability stuff because it's going to happen more and more so we're doing a lot more joint training and they're really calling us a lot saying hey, let's get together and get a good relationship. Tell us about the training. I mean you guys have training on that stuff all the time, aren't you? All day long today they were down in the marina doing ice rescue training and on this priority it's kept right constant. A great deal of the training we do is actually mandated in fact you talk about all our operations we don't just make this stuff up we try to run the minimum on a lot of it in some ways but so much of it is mandated by law you talk about the two in two out thing that's all OSHA respiratory protection standards and laws that we have to meet it's not a question of whether you think it's a good idea or not like some standards you know how many choice come 30 in the state of Wisconsin and OSHA respiratory protection laws and all of the worker safety laws and everything especially in the fire service it drives a great deal of what we do and that's why we have to do it and training is the enormous part of that we have to do annual refresher training on all our EMS we have to do annual training on confined space tech rescue we have to do SCBA training in respiratory use and all of the firefighter safety stuff so that's just the stuff that we have to do every year you know and now you try to fill in some of the holes of the things that would be nice to get to it's a tremendous amount of things because you know we train because it's not always learning something new a lot of it is just repetition that when you have to do it you get it right the first time it's not unlike the military they just do things over and over again so when you have to do it in a panic it just comes naturally to you it's more about it well and we're constantly bringing in new employees to prepare and can you just you know on the street where there's a water hydrant or hook up for the trucks if you hook up like three trucks after that what a hydrant will the truck have enough water coming in typically we'll have to hook to more than one hydrant and we have to know if they're all on the same line so that becomes a problem for us but that's probably one of the best things that Sheboygan has going for it is a very good water supply we do have some problems down in the east older area of town where some of the water means are smaller and older but that's the best thing that we are going for us is a good water supply and the location of our fire stations being that we have quick response times one more thing chief there's no one that you get a lot of misconception that we have a paramedic system and the admin service those are separate but people had to get their apartment first paramedic second that's the reason that when you see this kind of a thing it's very impressive to see a teamwork type of thing nobody runs into a building we've got a set routine that you have to do we don't want to add to the tragedy we want to solve the problem and on a scenario like this like I said we try to keep two of our med units outside doing clean work so they can respond what typically will happen is we'll automatically call two of our medics back in the work that are off duty to man our spare ambulance just to get that extra med unit out there because we are using our paramedics as fire fire exactly like tonight the same thing I mean it was very typical of having a house fire and we had a med call at the same time so it reduces what you have left chief in terms of now this fire is over you're packing up, you're getting back and you know kind of resetting everything how long does it take to put you know the truck back into service like we're looking here that's one of the things that the shift commander does automatically he's trying to get as many units back into service as he possibly can and that probably is going to take after the first half hour of this fire we'll start doing that and then we'll always leave probably two units here that are going to be tied up for on a fire like this it's probably going to be two to three hours is that just watching for hot spots you know we have to get into the attic we have to start opening up the walls we have to make sure that it's out so you know within half the investigation and then we call the fire investigator but within a half hour we're on something like this we're trying to get units back into service again and as quickly as we can we got to get them back to the fire else we have to use holes we have to reload holes onto the fire truck so that's one of the first things that after we go through all this that's the next thing in line is we got to get these units back in service in case we get another call they typically don't pull lines off every fire apparatus there intentionally to have other units ready just in case it's one or two units that pull the hose from and then the remaining units will be intact generally intact with that initial attack we need to fill our air bottles again we're no good without any air so we need to get those refilled that's another concern Chief can you just reiterate to me again about the importance of having the manpower on our fire department simply because of the two guys going out on a rig they're waiting for that additional manpower it's actually too full and I don't I don't like to say that we're running two people on a rig even though we're one of the only cities in the state that does it that way because I view our we have two people on an engine we have two people on a med unit and they are in most times going out together and working as a four person crew unless they're out on another med call I view them as a four person crew they're just coming on separate vehicles before we had the ambulance there were three people on that engine we drove out before below three because it was not a good working crew so that's very important that we have two people at all times in addition to that driver on that vehicle working and being able to pull a hose on because one person cannot pull a fire hose loaded with water it's just impossible and if you add ice and everything else into the equation you just can't do it and the other part of that equation is the total number of people that you get on the scene like tonight we had 15 people there that the way we are staffed now that allowed us to leave a fire engine in the fire house with two on if we don't hire the six that we lost that 15 people will be everybody that we have in the entire city there's nobody left that is one which is two thirds of the year when I have to allow four people out on vacation that will be everything that we have and there's nothing left for anything else where we were before we were sort of doing a pretty monumental task of managing risk and tonight you would have been able to operate on four or five Victor's tops I would have been a disaster I would say two would have been a real stretch we would there have been problems our issue starts to become death when things get beyond like this and which is very common for another or anything that goes on in the city or if we get something that is large geographically like the flood like a tornado like even a thunderstorm we got our rigs taxed as I said in the beginning it's risk management and we are set up to handle this fire with the amount of people that we have because we have charted how many times we get two fires at once it happens it's not a lot of times we get a med call and a fire call at the same time that happens more frequently but we are set up to handle this type of fire anything bigger we need help the other question I have and this again I want to touch on that firefighter paramedic thing because I guess it just bothers me firefighter paramedic a firefighter is a paramedic pretty much I mean the new people coming in don't they have that training already I guess I have to say the other way around a paramedic is a firefighter for everybody that we hire now we hire paramedics that are firefighters that are firefighters I don't think correct me if I'm wrong that you hire somebody with that training already correct? that's the only way you hire people ten years down the road when you have turnover you've got some firemen that are not paramedics now but ten years down the road that's how we won't be the case ten years, yeah that's the way the system was set up that as we go through this in 30 years from now everybody here will be a paramedic and now we have where you saw the scenario tonight they brought the victim down the steps and we need to get our paramedics there to do the advanced treatment on them and then to transport 30 years from now everybody is a paramedic everybody can do the same skills but ten years from now half of the department will be paramedics or more it's becoming the standard for emergency responders to have paramedic training hazardous materials training and it's not unlike the military and their approach to things anybody that goes into the military even if they're going to become an air force jet mechanic, first thing they do is they go to boot camp and they learn how to be a rifleman and during the time that they're in a ready when the time comes and they have to react quickly they're doing other things like the mechanic part, the fixing things they have all their duties within an organization that makes them be there but they're a rifleman first and that's a lot like the fire service approaches everybody is a firefighter they're all trained to be firefighters but in the course of being in that ready in the state there's all kinds of other jobs that we can do that are helpful and needed in the community and to maintain our own service that we also perform at the same time but unfortunately they need to be on and everybody out there is doing multiple duties we didn't just have one person stand by the hydrant and that's all he did he had to stand there until he had the hose hooked up and the man on the fire engine said we need water, it turns it on and he may be the one that goes and shuts the utilities off for us or he may be the one that goes and spreads the salvage covers over the personal belongings so everybody is doing multiple, multiple tasks but at the core of it is we need people to advance holes we need people to do ventilation we need people to set up ladders because without all the things that we do we can't do anything it's all tied together as I walk around and talk to neighbors a lot of them still don't realize that you're 24 or 7 you're running three full crews a day that just doesn't dawn on people when they see what's going on this is great thank you for your attendance I hope we were informational what if a fire station hose is that off the table now is that that was tossing on the fire station hose I think that is still out there because we haven't got our people replaced so I would say that is still out there I was wondering because it hasn't been talked about recently and I haven't seen any documentation from any committees if we don't hire any additional people by the end of or have them trained by the end of April when my vacation started in May we have to close something because I don't have anybody to put in there are you going to give the same over the same scenarios at the finance meeting that you did at Salary and Grievous when we are you going to do anything different than that I appreciate that that was very important for me I would recommend that I wanted to see that I haven't been given a request to do anything to finance yet I am assuming that is coming up I think that is very important what I presented at Salary and Grievous have you made that presentation of protection safety no consider you on the agenda okay that was a request that I think Alderman Gisha had given to me a number of weeks ago to present some options as we move into this year I really wish you would have had more time last question 8.5 persons should be closed which one would be the best to close should I work on the table can somebody run down and get my paper when it is on my table in my office it is on the table it is a tricky question right in the middle of the city is where the majority of all our calls are because these are the older buildings more densely populated and I have said this before I believe we can run this city with four fire stations very effectively and have decent response times the problem is these two here are not in the right place if I close this fire station this is a long response time to some of these northeast neighborhoods here if we close this fire station this is a very long response time off to the northwest and the western area the ideal thing would be to close both of these and have one right in the middle but obviously in today's economic times that is not a good option this new fire station number 5 has the least amount of calls so you would think that would be the one that I would recommend to close but this is a very very long response time we have run some of these they are like 10 minutes to the southeast the train is right here and I happen to live right on that track so I can tell you it comes by a lot and I have timed it it is about 4 minutes of time and I have also around it and timed it it takes 3 minutes to get around it whether you go east or west if the train is there it is not so much my concern if we close this one the response time for station 2 to get here what I am concerned about is this station is out on a call the next station has to come from here and that is 10-12 to 15 minutes like the trailer parks today my recommendation would be if I had to close this station I would close the downtown one because we can converge onto this area chief though when you say that you can run the city with 4 stations I do believe we want to still have the people in those stations I still need the same amount of people because as we saw tonight that is the amount of people we need to put that fire up I am just saying that we could probably save money by not paying utilities everything else but in terms of manpower closing the station doesn't solve our issues it doesn't solve the issue you need 3 more firemen paramedic firemen if you took the 4 firemen paramedics from the ambulance and we gave up the ambulance you would have your 4 firemen and we would not need to close the station but you would have to come up with about $630,000 from the ambulance service that is going into the general fund but you are correct we would be short our fire fighting capabilities would be reduced because we would have 4 less firefighters but we would not have to close the station that is correct we would come up with a deficit in our general fund you would have a deficit of $600,000 $600,000 if you take away the 4 wages that it is paying for and the $400,000 that we are putting in it is roughly $630,000 if you calculate if you close one station keep the same amount of firefighters just keep a close one per month for the city to save about $35,000 in utilities and then if you can sell the building an alderman caught I believe it is not 3 it is 6 to bring us back to whole it is 3 that you need a fire station I need the rescue pumper and 3 or I need 6 it is one of the two options which is what I presented two questions one is because we have a utility of Todd Wilson does this also require attention because of that unit being there when you start talking about closing now a station that is one of my questions my second one is when we offer the early retirement to some of our city personnel to free up some money for the new hires to come in and overpay was this part of this agreement for the early retirement plan we didn't have an early retirement in the early retirement in the early retirement police department at the first part of your question I didn't understand because of a line it is a public utility it is a federal government involving this thing which requires that you have that number of I don't know how to honestly answer that we do respond there where we're at we're fine with the coverage now that's what we're going to use in a new service okay so one more time if if the ambulance goes away there's a $600,000 net shortfall to the general farm and the four people go with it that $600,000 is funding those four people that goes with it if this hiring these extra people where in the budget is this money where we have a hiring freeze and the budget was passed where in the budget would this extra money come from well I know the firefighting union gave concessions of a 2% which was about $88,000 where that was put into the budget I don't know there were also some other concessions but it's not in my firefighting budget Alderman Gysha did say it's in the city budget but where that is I can't tell you I'm just caution people too when we say extra we're not talking about extra firefighters here we're just talking about replacing firefighters not extras no extras here just replacing what we already currently we're at but I think if the budget is set up they're not there at the beginning of the budget that's what we're asking for to put them in which means we have to change the budget you're both right he's saying it's seven folks retired and they need six firefighters you're absolutely correct the budget was set up without them that's why he just gave the big bucks my understanding from Salary Grievous is that he just made a motion to lift the hiring freeze and then that would be sent to finance for them to work out of it still needs to be funded that's what we talked about the other night and my point the other night was if you're talking about the three let's talk about what's really necessary at the same time if you're going to have that dialogue if three only gets us part way there let's talk about the six and let's see where the money is if a fire station saves us 35 grand and you can't I don't think it's a big market for resell a fire station if we could probably give you the list no we can't give you the list if you only hire three this vehicle goes on for one person for more than half the year and I can't it's a brand out for that if you live out there man I wouldn't like that so much your folks are going to ultimately with a train you could run into eight nine minute response times very easily and as you saw on the film where was that fire at nine minutes we're already there at nine minutes and putting it off if we're not there at nine minutes we're standing on the other side setting up what you get there so you're 11-12 minutes if we're there at 11-12 minutes that house is burning down aside from the fact that there's a large number of trailer parks down in those trailers yeah you don't even have a shot and our chance at saving life is very limited in that at all aside from the obvious financial question of excising the ambulance out of our department now it doesn't even begin to talk about equality the quality of the speed the continuity of the system every report you've delivered to me the response time is for the ambulance it's only going to get better and as you saw here as we brought a victim out now the same people that that person right away the firefighters that are treating them are taking them all the way to the hospital and if he needs to be transported to Milwaukee the same people that have had this person from the time we got him have him so there's no chance for miscommunication of information in between and that's important on all medical calls thank you chief we appreciate all the information you do make a care picture yes great and look chief no time required I don't wear them the last time I wore them move them drunk thank you