 Lakeland Public Television presents Currents. Hello, and welcome to Lakeland Currents. I'm Bethany Wesley. When you think about your local property taxes, what are the priorities you think they should fund? Police officers? Road repairs? Perhaps park improvements? For tonight's discussion, we are going to focus on a core service that you quite possibly may never need, yet always expect to be readily available. Fire protection. The Minnesota State Fire Marshal reports that there were more than 14,000 fire incidents reported throughout the state in 2015. Of those, 4,675 were residential structure fires, causing more than $130 million in total dollar loss. On average, a fire is reported once every 37 minutes in Minnesota, according to the Fire Marshal. More specifically, a structure fire is reported once every 86 minutes. But statistics only tell part of the story, and so tonight I welcome to the program two fire chiefs. David Hofer is the chief of the Bemidji Fire Department, and Seth Tram is the chief of the Solway Fire Department. Together, they will inform us of the services provided by their respective departments and discuss the considerations that go into fire department planning. Welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. As we get started, let's just give us a little bit background in terms of how long you've been with your departments and then talk generally in a little bit here about the departments themselves. Dave, how long have you been with the Bemidji Fire Department? Sure. I've been fire chief with Bemidji since 2010, so my seventh anniversary just recently. Started in the fire service in 1990. Okay, and where did you come from? I was a firefighter in Grand Forks, North Dakota. And Seth, how long have you been with Solway? I joined the department in 2007, so 10 years ago I've been the chief since 2011. Okay, great. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have the two of you here is because we can really kind of talk about the differences between your departments because they are operated very differently, and our viewers, because some are in the city and some are rural, can really hopefully get something out of both of them. So let's talk about your departments themselves. Seth, how big is your department? How many firefighters do you have? We have 17 total firefighters right now. And it is different because you are a complete volunteer fire department. That is correct. Yep, 100% volunteer. So you guys don't get paid per call, it's just people give up their own time. That's correct. Yep. And now what areas do you cover? Because you cover more than just Solway itself. We do, yep. So we cover the city of Solway and we cover three townships, Buzzel, Lammers, and Jones townships. Okay. All on the western edge of Beltrami County. And has that been the case for years? Years. Yep. And tell us a little bit about how Bemidji is set up because you have a combination fire department. Sure, yeah. Bemidji is a combination fire department. So we have a mix of full-time staff, seven full-time staff members, full-time firefighters, and then I'm a full-time fire chief. So we've got eight full-time staff members and then we are supplemented by 40 paid-on-call firefighters. So folks who have other jobs, who their primary job is not firefighting, but who we will bring in on larger incidents. Okay. We serve not only city of Bemidji, but 17 other local units of government around the Bemidji area, 15 townships, and a couple of the smaller cities, Wilton and Turtle River. We do that from three fire stations, strategically placed throughout the Bemidji area. Our firefighters then, for us, most or a majority of our calls are handled by our on-duty fire staff. Okay. When we need additional help, that's when we'll bring in our paid-on-call firefighters from our group of 40. Okay. And now let's talk just in terms of ballpoint. Ballpark. How many calls do you have average a year? We do between 30 and 35 calls a year. Okay. And that includes not only structure fires, but rescue, you know, motor vehicle accidents, alarms, things like that. Okay. All the calls altogether? Correct. And then for you, all calls altogether? Yep. For Bemidji Fire in 2016, we did 2,195 responses and 107 working fires. So of the 107 fires, 36 were structural. And then we have some wildland fires, along with vehicle fires and dumpster fires type stuff. And now in addition to your two departments, there's also other various departments in this Bemidji area, correct? I mean, you've got Cass Lake, you've got Black Duck, you've got a couple of different ones. Correct? Yes. Correct. Yep. How important is it for you guys to have communication between all the departments? Yeah. In Beltrami County, here in particular, we work together a lot with the other firefighting agencies. So from Bemidji's perspective, one of our primary mutual aid partners or neighboring departments that we work with a lot is Solway. And anytime we need additional resources, whether that's people, equipment, if we're on multiple fires at the same time, we have the ability to call on one another for help. And it's not only the structural fire departments, but it's also the wildland firefighting agencies in northern Minnesota. The big partner for Bemidji is the Minnesota DNR for wildfires, but we also partner up with our folks to the east and the Chippewa National Forest. So we all have the same interest in fire protection up here, but one of the things that we do on a regular basis here in Beltrami is our fire chiefs are very active. We meet on a regular basis to discuss issues of the day, discuss how we are going to provide quality fire protection, realizing the fact that there will be challenges that all of our agencies face, no matter what the size of your agency, and we all are going to need help at times from one another in the philosophy of neighbors helping neighbors. As a smaller department, have you seen the benefit of that, Seth, in terms of talking to others? Yeah, without a doubt. So being a volunteer department, we strive to give 100% in everything that we do, and that includes response to fires, but given our location, we don't always have rapid response, especially during the day, and so when we can rely on mutual aid partners, especially a department like Bemidji that's staffed full-time, that's a big benefit not only to our department, but to our community and the citizens that we serve. So yeah, it's vital. It's fair to say that throughout the state of Minnesota, there are a number of different ways to fund various fire departments. Not only do you have volunteer combination departments, there's a number of different ways. How important is it that a community really kind of looks at what it needs and sets up its department for them specifically? Yeah, ultimately it's up to the community to decide what type and level of fire protection they're going to have. I think a lot of it's based upon what the community needs are, but there is nothing in Minnesota that you have to have a fire department. I think what you see is you'll see various levels based upon what is an acceptable tolerance within a community, and then you'll see different structures in which fire departments are organized. So in Bemidji, we are a municipal fire department. We are a government-run organization, but that isn't the only way in which fire protection is accomplished in the state. Seth can talk about Solway Fire a little bit. Seth is not unique. There are a number of fire departments that are what he's going to describe. Tell us a little bit about the setup of yours. Our fire department is a non-profit organization. It's an independent non-profit. We have our own executive board and we contract with townships. So essentially those townships are customers of the non-profit organization. We make those decisions based on what we feel we can provide. So as we were mentioning earlier, you know we can't necessarily provide a great service for townships that are 10 miles away from us or 20 miles away from us. So we really try to focus on those core townships that directly surround the city of Solway. And we feel we can provide them with good coverage. So that's what we base our business plan on. And we have that board of directors essentially which is fire chief, an assistant fire chief and then we have a secretary and a treasurer. All the decisions that we make rather than going to a city board or a township board are then made within our department. So we of course try to be transparent with the townships that we contract with but those decisions are made within our department. And whereas you actually go and report to the Bemidji City Council, correct? Correct, yeah. Fire protection for the Bemidji area is done through a joint fire protection agreement between the city of Bemidji and Bemidji Rural Fire Association. That forms a group of 18 local units of government. And that group there is who I would directly report to. So we have a group of some city folks and some rural folks in which I report to. My immediate supervisor though is the city manager for the city of Bemidji. The city of Bemidji in our agreement is tasked with the day in and day out management or running of the fire department. But funding is provided through our entire service area. The whole area. Correct. I'm going to talk about the employees a little bit themselves. You have 17 fires in your department. You have many more. Who determines or how do you determine what that ideal staffing level is? Is it changed? Does it fluctuate? Go ahead. Well, I can speak to that on behalf of our department. So our bylaws stipulate that we can have up to 25 firefighters at any given time. In my tenure on the department we have never been fully staffed what you would consider fully staffed based on bylaws. Okay. We have always been between say 17 and 20 or 21. I think the goal is to be able to provide an efficient service. And so we can do that with the 17 firefighters that we have right now. Ideally, 21, 22 or 25 would be much better. But we never consider ourselves to be fully staffed until we're at that 25. But in terms of efficient fire protection, I think we're able to do that with where we're at. Ideally we'd have more. So for the benefit of our viewers here a volunteer fire department means these men and women are taking time out of their daily lives and responding when you have a call fair to say these people are usually working during the day. Is that a challenge for the department? I think that's one of our biggest obstacles. Fires don't always happen between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. or on the weekends. And because Solway doesn't have a lot of business in terms of right there in town, many of our firefighters either work in Bemidji or in Bagley or they work out of town. And so during the business day our response might be significantly lower than it might be at night. And again that goes back to Mutual Aid where it's very important for us to be able to make that call ahead of time. As soon as we know that we're going to be short, we make that call to either Bemidji or another one of our Mutual Aid partners and get help coming so we can provide that service. And Dave, how do you know what staffing level is appropriate for your department? For us, 48 firefighters is a full roster with 8 full-time staff members and 40 paid on call. And I think part of that is based upon some historical trends and making sure that we have enough staff members to deal with the typical emergencies that we are going to experience. Knowing that we cannot plan for any extreme case, but the typical emergencies. It's not uncommon in Bemidji to have simultaneous calls to emergencies happening at one time. So when we look at that, we try to assess to make sure that we can put an adequate number of resources people on our emergency scene. So from our perspective we really shoot to try to have on our structural fires 20 to 25 firefighters on a scene. So we have a system of 48 of our firefighters back, which will allow us to do that. So I think staffing is really determined upon your community's needs. And it also is determined a lot on availability. So when you have communities that struggle with getting people to respond when they're a paid on call or volunteer firefighter, I think that's when communities start looking at that maybe they have to start adding some paid positions. It's unique based on what the needs are for the community. So for instance, your department responds to every commercial passenger flight that comes in and out of the airport, correct? Correct. So last year you had how many? About 1100 of those, yep. And so is that something that's required of you, of the departments? Is that like a state law or is that just something that the community has decided is important or how does those come together? Yeah, one of our fire stations, one of the three that we have in Bemidji is at the airport. And that fire station not only serves the airfield but it also serves off of the airfield the structural and wildland on response components. So the FAA, through their regulations, requires fire protection at an airport. Airports choose to do that a number of different ways. It could be provided by airport staff, a dedicated airport fire department or municipal departments that provide that. In our case fire protection and rescue services to this airport is provided by Bemidji Fire Department. So we have a dedicated firefighter out at the airport anytime we have a scheduled commercial passenger flight coming in and out of the airport so that we have a quick response time in the event of an aircraft emergency or incident in a passenger flight. So the airport authority does reimburse us for those services that we're providing out there which does help us with our budget. Okay. I want to talk about some of the calls specifically. Can you give us an indication maybe a picture in terms of average 35 calls? How many of those are fires versus some of the other calls that you listed, Seth? Yeah, so you know annually we can have anywhere between 3 and 10 structure fires. Those aren't all of course homes houses, they're outbuildings, they're garages, they're barns. We have several motor vehicle accidents, Highway 2 runs right through our service area and that's a heavily traveled road and so we have frequent motor vehicle accidents. Sometimes they're cars in the ditch, sometimes they don't need a response but we get paged out. And then I would say the rest would be wildland fires. We do between 5 and 10 wildland fires every year depending on how you know how the conditions are. It's probably about a third of each really, you know upwards of 10 of each of those three. So I know the Bemidji Fire Department for example responds to medical calls within the city limits. Do you guys also do medical calls or is that up to each department then as well? Yeah, so we do not respond to medical calls. We strictly do fire and rescue. For us to be able to provide response to medical calls, we wouldn't be able to provide that service efficiently because again most of our firefighters are out of town especially during the day. And so out there the group that is charged with that is really the first responder group so they have west squad first responders that provide that service. And then Dave, break down if you can some of those calls per year. You have this structure, you have fires and then rescues. Could you give us a break down? Yeah, so we do about a hundred fire responses a year on average. And that's a mix of structural fires wildland fires, vehicle fires, dumpster fires and the nuisance type fires. We also do technical rescue responses. So technical rescue is water and ice rescue, motor vehicle extrications, structural collapses, elevator rescues, things like that. And we'll do about a hundred and fifty of those roughly a year. And it kind of depends on the year. In addition to that commercial fire alarm activations so somebody burnt some food somewhere, things like that. We'll do about a hundred and seventy five to two hundred of those types of responses on an annual basis. Within the city of Bemidji and right in the outskirts of Bemidji we will respond to life threatening emergency medical calls. In a non-transport mode we do not run an ambulance service. We do have the ability to get on scene in a timely fashion and make a difference in life threatening EMS calls. So really what we're looking at is somebody's not breathing, their heart's not beating, major trauma, strokes and things like that. So about four hundred calls a year for those. In addition to that it would be some hazardous materials calls. We typically get a handful of those every year. Natural gas leaks, fuel oil spills things like that. And then some of the other miscellaneous hazard calls maybe we've got a down arcing power line or things like that. I want to talk a little bit about Mutual Aid and how that works. We've talked a little bit about it here but take us through an actual example if you would Seth. If there was a structure fire in Solway at what point do you know that you need to call for backup? So that's one of our primary goals to assess what staff we have coming in and then what our needs are going to be and if we assess that our needs are going to be more than what we have to make that call early. We, you know, at any given time we'll have between say ten and fifteen firefighters responding to a call. Minor incidents that's plenty to cover what we need. If we have an active structure fire we're going to make that call early. And primarily that's to Dave's team and Bemidji. Being a full-time service we know that they can get a truck started in a hurry, usually have a crew on the road within just a couple minutes. We really rely on that in terms of what our active response is going to be to a fire. I guess from a standpoint of adequate staffing it's really based on what the situation is. We have, we cover Northwoods, for example, the OSB mill west of town here and we get called there several times a year and sometimes it's fairly minor and other times it's larger and so we really try to make that assessment early again depending on the situation we make the call. We would much rather err on the side of caution and get a team coming and then end up turning them around if we get unseen and we know that extra help isn't needed but we don't want to get behind the eight ball and then help is farther away than we want it to be. And then Dave is it fair to assume that you get called out for mutual aid more often than you get it or is it about equal? I think it's about equal. We have a similar philosophy in Bemidji that's always does. I expect our incident commanders to assess scenes early on, anticipate resource needs and if we do not have adequate resources to ask for help pretty early on and that could mean additional firefighters or a common one that we do with our mutual aid partners is just shuttling water bringing water to a structural fire or if we're taxed and stretched in on multiple fires bringing some folks in to help so one of the things that we have up in Beltrami County is a countywide mutual aid agreement so in addition to our local mutual aid agreements that each of the fire departments have with their neighboring departments we have all entered into a countywide mutual aid agreement so Seth and I may run up to Kellier for example and assist Kellier fire even though it's 50 plus miles away on a large scale incident and Bemidji is also part of the statewide mutual aid plan and there are a number of larger departments throughout the state that participate in a statewide mutual aid plan and one of the things that we do there is we have the ability to deploy anywhere in the state of Minnesota if requested in if we can do it that's the other thing that mutual aid agreements do is we all have to assess our individual ability to provide help via mutual aid request so there have been times in some of our statewide requests where Bemidji has said no and the fact is that we didn't have the resources to deploy and still have an adequate level of protection here in Bemidji so that's some of the things that work out really well you are seeing lots of cooperation amongst Minnesota fire service agencies today in people helping one another and I think that's making us much more effective and efficient I think that's helping us keep fires there's lots of great examples of that I want to talk more than just the fire protections or responding to the actual fires themselves how important or how big of a part do you play in terms of fire prevention and education and reaching outside and talking to people and having programs does your department do that Seth? Do you go out and we do so our scope is fairly narrow we provide annual education at the school so kids, let's say we have K-5 out there I believe and we do that annually every fall additionally we do some kind of cold weather safety and that's usually in collaboration with Dave's team at the school in Solway we've also done historically some courses for like the NEL group it's Northern Exposure to Lifelong Learning 55 Alive, some things like that but our scope is fairly small again this is done with volunteer people so we do absolutely what we can education is primarily important anytime we can get out there in the community we like to do that Tell us about some of the activities that your department does because I know you have a number of different programs you kind of do to do that so how does that work? Fire prevention for us is pretty high on the priority list we know that there's only so much we can do when we're in a reactive response mode but we can do a lot on the prevention side and in Bemidji our prevention program really is two-fold it's an educational component along with the code enforcement component so our educational component is we've got a number of different target audiences that will go hit not only the school age kids but it could be some adult groups it could be some college students but very very progressive public education campaign just describing to folks what are the common causes of fire and if a fire does start how do we act appropriately we know that that's real important to do that so we spend hundreds of hours a year doing fire prevention education some of the programs that we're involved with is we've partnered up with the American Red Cross for smoke alarm installations so if you're in the Bemidji area and you need a smoke alarm we will give you a smoke alarm for you of charge we will come out and install it for you we know that working smoke alarms will save lives so we do that very aggressively and install smoke alarms so the other part of our fire prevention program is the code enforcement so I'm the primary code official for Bemidji we have a number of different types of buildings that we would inspect for fire code items and fire safety items on an annual basis and then we also are very thorough when new buildings are being constructed to make sure that fire safety features are incorporated and incorporated properly on the front side so fire prevention is really the best way to save a life and to minimize damage from a fire so to these final moments I did want to have a chance to touch on the amount of training and the work that your teams do to make sure they're up to date and safe tell me a little bit about some of the training requirements for SOA fire department how often are they getting together for that we train monthly and meet for a business meeting monthly and then we meet for a training meeting monthly additionally all of our firefighters need firefighter one and firefighter two within a year of joining our department so we really of course it's great when people come to us with that training already that usually doesn't happen and so we take that first year to really just get them comfortable with being part of the department knowing the ropes there and then we use that year to get them trained with firefighter one and firefighter two beyond that then it's really department specific training we do things like pump operations to make sure that a firefighter is capable of getting water out of the truck into where they need it to be it's emergency vehicle driving training it's hoses and ladders and all kinds of things like that that really equate to safety on a fire scene Dave quickly how how much training do your guys go through yep we have similar training our new recruits it's a hundred plus hours before they even get to see an emergency scene to make sure that they can do the skills safely and we also have various positions in which we do position specific training and then for us we've got some specialty teams whether it's a water nice or rope rescue hazardous materials team that also have additional hours training but it's thousands of hours a year that the midget firefighters spend on training well listen we could have talked about this for I'm sure a whole another hour here but I appreciate you guys coming and talking to us and giving us some information about the departments and fire protection at you tuning in tonight if you want more information about either department please visit one of the websites here listed on the bottom of your screen on the Bemidji site you can certainly access your annual report and get some more data and in the meantime join me next time thank you