Pocatello Fire Department sees increase in calls for 2015

How well did the city of Pocatello do in its public service efforts last year?

That’s one question the city is hoping to have answered after it made its 2015 service level report available to the public on Monday.

One department that has some concerns after looking at their numbers for the year, is the Pocatello Fire Department.

Pocatello Fire Chief David Gates said that even thought the department’s numbers had improved from 2014, their workload has continually increased.

Gates said the increasing number of calls is having an effect on efficiency.

EMS, or medical response calls, make up 83 percent of the Pocatello Fire Department’s total calls. The number of EMS calls is up 6.3 percent from 2014.

With so many calls for staff to answer, it’s taking away training time for firefighters to be efficient in all procedures, especially the ones they don’t do on a day-to-day basis.

“We’re expected to do a lot of things, things we don’t do on a daily basis,” said Gates. “And so we have to train to be prepared for those things.”

Gates said it takes away not only from training rookie firefighters, but in keeping up training for experienced firefighters, too.

“The interruptions to training make training become less effective and really, these standards of training are increasing on a regular basis,” said Gates. “Things that we’re involved in, it’s becoming a much more technical industry.”

The number of overall responses has increased too by eight percent. So one important factor they look at is turnout time.

“You as a person that were calling 911, all you care about is how long it took from the time you called to the time I arrived,” said Gates.

But the department has more steps to consider. The first stage is call processing, where dispatchers get the information needed. The second stage is turnout time, which is how long it takes firefighters to get ready and leave the station. The last stage is travel time. All of these stages have to be under a standard time of 8 minutes and 12 seconds.

Gates said this can sometimes be tough because travel time varies, and sometimes the department is short-handed.

“We had, I want to say, just about 100 times where we literally had no resources available in 2015,” said Gates.

Yet the department still had an overall improvement in turnout time by 5.9 percent. Gates said while there’s room for improvement, he’s satisfied the department did their best.

“I think we handled our calls,” said Gates. “I think we do a pretty good job of meeting the demand.”

Gates said another issue they see is with bigger homes and businesses being built. Smaller fire stations aren’t equipped to handle them, and so they may not have the staff or equipment necessary.

Gates said all of these issues are things they’ll be working on to improve the 2016 report.

The complete service level reportis on the city’s website.