Have you noticed? Mutual aid for fire response has gotten out of hand. Some 10-15 years ago, newspaper reports typically would list 6 or 7 fire departments that showed up to assist the lead agency. The number has since crept up to 12. Why?
At this point — which is to say, following exploration into why Sycamore’s fire department couldn’t get its ladder truck to the Tom & Jerry’s restaurant fire — I’m convinced the additional mutual aid participation reflects uncertainty; specifically, uncertainty about which personnel and what equipment the assisting communities can spare at any given moment. They are hedging their bets as never before.
The underlying causes of the uncertainty are essentially the same as what prompted DeKalb to open a fourth fire station last year: despite failing to achieve population growth that would support a new station, we somehow have nevertheless produced enough additional EMS demand to justify the build. I’ve easily found other Illinois communities in similar boats, and DeKalb’s new fire chief, Luke Howieson, confirmed for me last week that these trends plague EMS systems nationwide. Here are the main challenges:
— Problems recruiting and retaining EMS personnel.
— Rising volumes of emergency medical calls and associated simultaneous/overlapping calls.
Shortages of healthcare workers, including EMS clinicians working in ambulances, worsened during the first two years of Covid. Everyone expected the problem to ease up — Sycamore’s annual fire department report said 2022 was supposed to be the “back to normal year,” for example. It wasn’t. And while EMS workforce hiring rates have since improved in some areas, high burnout and turnover rates continue to erode employee retention.
Meanwhile, calls for emergency medical services (not fires) have risen steadily, from pre-Covid years to the present, even in communities where populations are stagnant or shrinking. Increases in call volume lead to higher rates of simultaneous/overlapping calls for service, which boosts the risk for delays and worse. These impacts, especially in rural areas, are exacerbated by hospital closures, which force ambulances to drive farther to reach emergency rooms. However, even hospitals that remain open can and do shrink or eliminate departments (e.g., inpatient behavioral health) and of course that also ends up increasing the number of EMS calls.
The big picture is a healthcare system that has reached a new level of dysfunction. This slide is not new, but in many cases has left local governments to pick up more of the pieces than ever.
Lastly, let’s circle back around to mutual aid. Sycamore Fire reached the limits of their resources on January 31 and mutual aid picked up the slack. This means Sycamore’s problem is DeKalb’s problem, too. Furthermore it highlights the stakes for ensuring the mutual aid network successfully weathers these burdens, and the key to its resilience is to improve the performance of individual fire departments and districts as far as possible.
So I’ll be sticking to this topic for a while. Watch for a post summarizing individual fire departments’ strategies for addressing the problems described here. After that, we’ll spotlight DeKalb Fire Department’s new outreach program.
More:
DeKalb Fire Department annual reports
Sycamore Fire Department annual reports
Note: You can gain a lot of pertinent information quickly by going straight to the stats pages of these reports.