INDIAN RIVER SHORES — The Indian River Shores town council heard straight from an Insurance Services Office inspector that its Public Safety Department is way under-staffed when it comes to firefighters to maintain its good fire protection rating that enables residents to get better fire insurance rates.
The town owns two nearly new fire engines with pumpers, one being a Quint ladder truck designed to serve multiple purposes. Also parked in the bays near Town Hall are two big, red Advanced Life Support-equipped ambulances, also nearly new, ready to roll on medical calls.
According to Mike Morash, manager of ISO’s Community Hazard Mitigation division, those two pieces of equipment actually count as three fire “companies” and if the town was to operate all three of those functional units at once to handle multiple incidents or one large structure fire, it would need 18 firefighters on duty at once, six per company, times three. That’s not counting police officers to direct traffic or secure a crime or accident scene, and it’s not counting paramedics to administer first aid to fire victims or to first responders.
The Shores was operating on four-man shifts, a veritable skeleton crew. Last year the Town Council voted to hire six more people who were at least certified firefighters and paramedics, achieving six-man shifts with the use of per diem employees to fill in for vacations, sick time and training. The new firefighter-paramedics could get their police training later to achieve the Town’s unique triple-trained status. One of those hired is enrolled at the police academy now.
But those extra hands still only make six-man shifts, not the 18-plus recommended by the ISO expert who briefed the town council in advance of an inspection.
Having 18 firefighters on duty at all times is simply not remotely realistic, but the Shores’ new Public Safety Director, Chief Rich Rosell is asking to go up to eight-man shifts to better position the town to score as high as possible when the ISO inspector finally comes in.
After reviewing the data, Rosell told the council in a memo, “I am of the opinion that the Town should increase manpower by, at a minimum, three Public Safety Officers. This increase would allow us to meet the absolute minimum staffing requirements.”
Minimum staffing, that is, for one incident at a time, not for multi-tasking. If the Shores’ officers were asked to juggle multiple incidents or even multiple calls for service that required fire and medical vehicles to respond to different emergencies at once, that would pose a problem.
“This increase would not provide the agency with the ability to carry out any law enforcement duties during a working fire, nor would it permit for proper response to a simultaneous EMS call,” Rosell told the council. “In order to provide optimal service, I urge the council to consider increasing the manpower by six Public Safety Officers.”
The eight-man shifts are what Town Manager Robbie Stabe and then-acting director Mike Jacobs requested the town council approve in July 2014 when the issue of the impending ISO rating inspection and the weaknesses in staffing came to light. Jacobs had approached the council a few months before to warn that the Town could be downgraded significantly from its current rating of 4 on a 1-to-10 scale with 1 being the best. Morash said last week that 99 percent of homeowner insurance companies consider the Town’s ISO rating in the calculation of fire premiums, but that each company weighs the ISO rating differently.
Stabe referred to the National Fire Protection Association’s best practices, which form the basis of the ISO evaluation. “While these recommendations are not considered hard (and) fast rules, they are accepted worldwide as the industry standard. They would, however, potentially seriously affect our residents’ individual homeowner insurance rates,” Stabe told the Council.
“Therefore, the town must strive to achieve these standards to the best of our ability in order to obtain the best ISO rating possible, resulting in lower insurance premiums for our residents,” he said.
Councilman Dick Haverland at the time said that, based on his own research and career knowledge of the industry being a retired insurance CEO, he did not think the town would be downgraded to the point that it would significantly increase premiums. A compromise was struck and the council last year voted to up staffing by two permanent, full-time officers per shift, and to keep supplementing the ranks with per diem officers who are, in effect, borrowed from other agencies. A few of the per diem workers are retired yet still certified firefighter-medics or even triple-trained officers.
Morash said that typically, any downgrade between a 3 and an 8 could be expected to result in an increase of 10 percent per step. So under that scenario, a downgrade from a 4 to a 6 could mean a 20 percent hike in the fire portion of homeowner premiums only. A slide from a 4 to an 8 could mean a 40 percent increase.
The staff-recommended eight-man shift level of staffing would afford the town eight-person shifts, meaning four firefighters could begin to work a fire according to the “two-in, two-out rule” that dictates for safety reasons firefighters go into a burning building in pairs and rotate out with another team. For a major fire, a fifth person is required to be in command, or to fight the fire from above with the hoses and ladder apparatus. That would leave two paramedics to operate one of the Town’s two ambulances, and finally one person to handle law enforcement duties while the others were fighting the fire and treating fire victims.
The Shores can call Indian River County Fire-Rescue or the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office for aid, but the so-called “mutual aid agreement” with the county does not count toward the town’s ISO rating, Morash told the town council in his presentation. With regard to medical services, Indian River County only has 11 ambulances to service the entire county and on a typical day those vehicles and life-saving personnel are scrambled from their home stations to far-flung corners of the county to respond to calls. During tourist season, ambulances also sometimes back up in a queue waiting to deliver patients to hospital emergency rooms.
“It is staff’s opinion that the use of our mutual aid agreement with the Indian River County Fire District should only be used on rare occasions and not be routine in nature,” Stabe told the Council last year in a memo that was re-distributed last week in the agenda packet. “Each of our residents deserve to receive the high quality medical services from their Public Safety Department.
The town council is scheduled to take the public safety staffing issue up as a Board on Thursday.
