Consultant: Groton City Needs More Firefighters

The City of Groton Fire Department should hire more firefighters, improve its response time and consider closing one of its two stations, a consultant study has found.

The study, released June 23 by Emergency Services Consulting International, reported firefighters from the Groton Fire Department arrived at the scene of an emergency within 8 minutes of a call, 90 percent of the time. The standard used by the National Fire Protection Association is 5 minutes.

Groton Fire Chief Nicholas DeLia said he doesn’t agree with the response time figures reported and said they were not scientifically studied. But he said he agrees the department needs more staff.

“The message I get out of it is we need help,” DeLia said. “And now we need to figure out how we’re going to do that.”

Under regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, firefighters may not enter a burning building unless they have a partner and two people outside who can rescue them if needed. The exception to the rule is if someone is trapped inside.

Daniel Tompkins, president of Groton Firefighters IAFF Local 1964, said firefighters get to the scene within the recommended time, but are staffed at a minimum of three people, so they must wait for backup.

“We should be able to provide an initial response by ourselves, without having to wait for an outside agency,” he said. 

City Councilors referred the report Monday to an ad hoc committee that will include three councilors, the fire chief and Tompkins as head of the union. The group will report back to the City Council in October.

“I think there’s an issue of (whether) we rely too much on mutual aid, there’s an issue of do we actually have enough people on those trucks to do the job when serious calls come in,” said City Councilor William Jervis, chairman of the ad hoc committee.  

Response time will also likely be discussed. The National Fire Protection Association measures response time from time a call is dispatched to when the first fire company arrives on a scene. The standard is based on how quickly a company responds 90 percent of the time, rather than the average response time, to evaluate response in the vast majority of incidents.

Groton’s average response time was 4 minutes, 49 seconds, the report said.

Jervis said the response times may be slightly better than they appear, due to a delay in recording when firefighters arrive.

The Groton Fire Department covers an area of about 3.2 square miles in Groton City, and another 1.5 square miles through contract with the West Pleasant Valley Fire District. About 11,000 people live in the two areas combined.

The department has two stations– one on Eastern Point Road and one on Broad Street –staffed mostly with volunteers, and keeps a minimum of three people on per shift – two at Eastern Point and one at Broad Street.

The report recommends increasing the minimum to four, consolidating by possibly closing the Broad Street station and creating an automatic mutual aid agreements with other areas.

To boost staffing levels, the report said the city could hire paid, part-time staff rather than hiring full-time employees or paying overtime to current employees.

Tompkins said the union has argued with the city for ten years about staffing. During the last round of negotiations, he said the firefighter’s union again asked for more help, the city refused, and the union took the case to arbitration in 2007. During that process, an agreement was made to have an independent consultant look at staffing in the department.