Aug, 2000

What is the job of the Fire Department?

The mission statement of the Plainfield Fire Department (PFD) is as follows:

To provide those services, either proactive or emergency necessary to protect and enhance the quality of life for the residents and visitors to Plainfield Charter Township.

Based on that statement, it’s obvious that we feel that our job is more than just “fighting fires and saving lives”. In reality the fire department responds to over 2000 calls for assistance a year, and only 5% of those calls involve fires. What do we do the rest of the time, and why do we have all of that fire equipment if we only go to about a 100 fire calls per year?

First I’ll address the issue of equipment. Communities around the United States are given a rating class, by an agency called the Insurance Services Office. This rating relates to the ability of a community’s fire department to fight a fire and directly affects your insurance premium. The difference between a Class 9 rating and a Class 5 rating can be hundreds of dollars on a $100,000 home. Fifty percent of the rating is for the fire department, forty percent is water supply and the remaining ten percent is dispatch. Applying formulas to the different agencies equipment, operations, and capabilities allows for the determination of a rating class. The scale goes from Class 1-10 with Class 1 being the best. There are only a handful of Class 1 cities in the nation. Our community is a Class 5. This rating is due to the quality of our water department’s system, as well as the state of readiness of the fire department. All of Plainfield Township is rated a Class 5 regardless of the proximity of a fire hydrant to a structure, so everyone benefits from our ability to provide water on a fire scene. PFD was the first department in the state to receive this high a rating in a combined hydrant, non-hydrant situation. Potentially, if we reduce our equipment inventories without making other adjustments your insurance premium could increase dramatically.

Second what are we doing on all of these other calls? A big share of them, 70%, are medically related, either medicals or rescues. The difference being that a medical is a situation where someone has been injured, or is so ill that they have called an ambulance; and a rescue requires our removing someone from a hazardous situation. Most rescue situations also require medical treatment. Kent County’s system for providing EMS (Emergency Medical Service) relies upon the fire departments and ambulance companies responding together. The fire departments are to respond to an average of 90% of the serious medical calls within four minutes, and the ambulance has 12 minutes to arrive. Without this two-tiered system there would need to be many more ambulances making the cost of providing that service out of reach. Incidentally, if we were to quit making medical calls our budget would not change by more than a couple of percent. We also respond to calls for assistance such as; hazardous material spills, wires down and arcing, CO detectors sounding, lockouts, smoke alarms sounding, and many other situations where the public doesn’t know who to call. Additionally last year the full time employees spent 3850 hours on station and equipment maintenance; 220 hours on fire prevention; 1350 hours training; 300 hours making inspections; and 350 hours on investigations.

The fire department has over twenty different programs that it provides, either internally or externally. These programs are intended to make the community a safer place to live and the department a safer place to work. It is my feeling that by doing this we maximize the use of your tax dollar, and that can’t ever be a bad thing.