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Friday
March 29th, 2024

fire year in reviewFirefighters work to extinguish a blaze at a business on Second Street in 2018. Fire officials are saying the number of fires was significantly higher in 2019 over the previous year. L&T file photoELLY GRIMM • Leader & Times

 

The local fire departments are constantly kept busy with calls and other trainings and last Tuesday, Deputy Fire Chief Skeety Poulton talked to the Liberal City Commission about what had happened during 2019. 

“As I mentioned to all of you earlier, our numbers for 2019 were way up, we ended up running 1,601 calls,” Poulton said. “And if you look in your monthly summary, the last call of the year was actually 1,602, but there was a number that was missed in the software, so I contacted the state, and they never contacted me back. So that’s the reason for the discrepancy from the 1,602 to the 1,601. Of the increased 151 calls we increased last year, 140 of those were medical calls and 11 were either fire related or hazardous materials, hazardous conditions or public assistance.”

Poulton then went through the rest of the packet information with the commission. 

“As you go through everything, the first page is an overall summary of what has happened in the past month and during the year,” Poulton said. “The second page, as you see, breaks it all down by calls by shift and then by district, and methods of extinguishment. Then moving forward, that next page is the classification by date and time, there’s a lot of time that goes into these reports – I do the quality control and make sure they’re good before being sent to the state, and then based off of those reports is where all of this information comes from.”

Poulton added there is a lot of training the firefighters must go through. 

“With the public education we do, our fire marshal takes care of approximately 90 to 95 percent of those efforts. But there are some times when the shift personnel will handle a tour of the fire station or do a visit to one of the schools in town. But for the most part, our fire marshal takes care of that and he does an outstanding job,” Poulton said. “Our fire responses are also broken down in your packet information there along with our rescue and medical responses. There are also many regular inspections we perform in local businesses, and there are multiple times where Cody [Regier] will go out and do the final inspection of everything at a new business from the alarms to the sprinkler system, whatever needs looked at. One of the big figures in there is the dollar loss for the year, that amount for 2019 is $201,650, that is actually down $566.000 from last year, so we actually had a really good year for dollar loss. We respond on people’s worst days, but it’s good to see that amount has gone down. Our number of structure fires has increased, but the dollar losses went down.”

“With that in mind, does that help with our fire rating at all?” commissioner Ron Warren asked. 

“Ultimately, not really,” Poulton said. “One very important thing is the training part of what we do, and our training for 2019 totaled more than 5,600 hours compared to 4,200 for 2018. That went from about 11.7 hours per day of training up to 15.4 hours. And when you look at those numbers, that’s not what is actually occurring every single day but it also includes when we have big group gatherings and there are five or six hours with 20 to 25 people, that adds up really quickly.”

Poulton then talked about how the average shift goes for the firefighters. 

“The firefighters spend about two hours each day doing truck checks and maintenance and two hours on station duty, to start,” Poulton said. “Apparatus cleaning then takes about two hours, shift training is usually about two hours. They’re also required to do some type of physical fitness for an hour, they’ll self-study for about an hour and then a crew will go out and do the business inspections or test the hydrants, which is generally about one or two hours, so all of that is about 11 to 12 hours just for those tasks, and each shift is 24 hours, from 7 a.m. one day to 7 a.m. the next day. A new firefighter who has all the required training and certifications is going to show an increase of about 6.1 hours per person as far as training and then more hours on emergency response and then they also have to grab some rest since they’re on a 24-hour shift. So it makes for a very full day and our guys are busy all the time. We’re averaging 4.4 calls per day now and we have 20 full-time firefighters and most of them have all the needed certifications, and many are working on the last parts of all of that.”

And the numbers presented to the commission Tuesday, Poulton, do not fully represent the work of the fire department. 

“And keep in mind this doesn’t account for our high school fire science program we’re helping with, and this doesn’t account for our Thursday night fire trainings and things like station tours and other things Cody sets up. And Cody sets up a lot of things, they did 978 inspections last year for fire safety and there were also fireworks inspections that were done, and he also looks over the plans for new businesses coming in so he can make sure everything fire safety-wise will be up to code,” Poulton said. “And if a business calls us needing to have the flow tested with the fire hydrants in front of their business, we’ll do that too, and there were 79 of those conducted. And with the certifications I mentioned earlier, after everything is calculated, it comes out to about 1,304 hours total needed for certifications and things like that. And the Liberal Fire Department is great about getting new firefighters through all the needed certifications as quickly as possible in order to be sure everyone is where they need to be. Our administration is also in it for the long haul, the average number of years of service is 24 years. Our firefighters are also proving their time with us.”

“I’m always very impressed with the end-of-the year reports you give, they’re always very thorough and well done,” Liberal Vice Mayor Taylor Harden said. “You’ve all done a phenomenal job rising to all of those extra calls and everything else you deal with, we can’t thank you all enough for what you do.”