Of the 100,000 calls to Montgomery County emergency rescue services last year, less than 1 percent were reporting building fires, agency officials said Thursday. During that same time period, Fire and Rescue Service personnel responded to nearly 72,000 calls for emergency medical services.
Those numbers represent a changing role for many of Montgomery County’s first responders, and county officials are trying to decide how best to adapt.
Another factor: The number of calls for fires has dropped about 20 percent from a total of 1,132 in fiscal 2001 to 940 in fiscal 2006, according to a briefing on Thursday by FRS Chief Tom Carr before the council’s Public Safety Committee. During that same five-year stretch, calls for emergency medical service increased from 65,000 in 2001 to 71,899 in fiscal 2006.
As a result of those changes, county officials on Thursday suggested a need to shift to specially trained fire and EMS personnel to better serve the community’s needs. Committee member Marc Elrich proposed building satellite EMS-only stations to increase response times in already congested areas.
“If your need is increasingly EMS, a fire station is not necessarily the best effective response,” Elrich said.
Carr called the idea “a good concept” but said the agency must first complete build-out in developing areas, including Clarksburg, where response times are longer because the lack of stations means emergency responders must now travel farther.
“I think in the down county, where we’ve built out already, that makes sense to increase capacity by putting units in strategic parts of the county,” Carr said.
Fire officials attribute the drop in the number of fires in part to a county law passed in 2003 ruling that all new home construction be outfitted with sprinkler systems.
The department is moving toward 24-hour staffing at all of the county’s 33 fire stations with four full-time employees, up from three, Carr said, which he said will add to effectiveness.
“As that happens, we will be able to reduce the number of units that we send because we have more staffing, we get more people to the scene sooner,” Carr said.
