CHENANGO COUNTY – After more than a year of planning and talks with fire departments throughout the county, the Chenango County Bureau of Fire last week finalized an updated mutual aid plan that will go into effect in January.
Since 1961, a fire mutual aid plan has been in place to set guidelines by which resources of the 21 fire departments in Chenango County are used for fire protection and other emergencies that require fire service responses. Although few changes have been made to the document in its 52-year history, recent updates developed by the Chenango County Fire Advisory Board and approved by the Chenango County Board of Supervisors will likely improve on response times and help local departments manage their resources more efficiently, according to fire officials.
“We’re using this plan to try to be more efficient with the manpower that’s available,” explained Chenango Bureau of Fire Coordinator Matthew Beckwith. “Our job as fire fighters is always to protect our communities and since a lot of departments have only a few volunteers available, we needed to come up with a plan to protect them.”
Revisions to the mutual aid plan envelop changes to the process of calling for help in the event of a structure fire. Whereas it’s currently the decision of a fire chief to call for assistance from other departments if needed in their district, the updated plan requires an automatic dispatch for help from surrounding departments. The fire chief would then cancel the call if additional help is not needed.
The order in which departments are called for assistance is also subject to change. As it stands, a structure fire in one district is responded to by the department in that district and mutual aid is provided by surrounding departments one at a time.
“If Department A has a fire, they call for help from Department B,” Beckwith explained. “Then, Department B calls Department C to cover them, Department C calls Department D and so on.”
When the updated plan goes into effect in January, a dispatch for help will automatically go to all surrounding departments simultaneously. The intention is take only a pieces of equipment and small amounts of manpower from each department, thereby keeping any one department from depleting all its resources. If there’s a structure fire in Plymouth, for example, the Plymouth Fire Department will respond first and a call for mutual aid will immediately be sent to surrounding departments in Norwich, North Norwich, Sherburne, Smyrna, Pharsalia, Preston and McDonough.
“Right now, there’s a lot of resources and a lot of apparatuses moving from station to station,” Beckwith said. “But if we take a tanker form this department, a ladder from this department and labor from this department, we’re not taking all resources from one station ... These are the same resources we have called all along. We’ll just be calling them earlier.”
Changes to the mutual aid plan are also a direct response to the decline in volunteer firefighters in recent years. Fewer volunteers means less manpower to respond to emergencies and in many instances, leads to a longer response time. With a broader range of departments responding to a structure fire at the same time, hopes are to reduce those risks, said Beckwith. “It’s recognizing the fact we have a lack of membership in the county and a lack of response. The numbers are down but we still have houses burning, we still have accidents and we still have communities to protect.”
Fire Chief Tracy Chawgo of the Norwich Fire Department – the only department in the county with a paid 24-hour crew – said the revised plan is a step in the right direction.
“Areas will be covered by the same department that have been helping all along,” Chawgo noted. “For some, it will be a learning experience. With change comes some of the growing pains; but this ensures we have the right people and the right equipment en route in a timely fashion.”
He added, “It’s about departments working together to help each other. We all have labor issues at one point or another.”