Wakefield Fire Department Eyes Future As Call Volumes Climb

WAKEFIELD, MA — The month of August saw major house fires bookend a mutual aid response to wildfires in the Breakheart Reservation for the Wakefield Fire Department.

While high-profile, those incidents were the tip of the iceberg, Fire Chief Michael Sullivan said this week, as the department faces a larger trend of surging call volumes and limited resources.

“The town definitely needs to keep its eye on it,” Sullivan said of the issue in a presentation to the Town Council on Monday.

The fire department prepares monthly reports of call volume and other data. While the August report is complete, it had not been shared through the town’s website as of Tuesday night.

Sullivan and Deputy Fire Chief Thomas Purcell spoke with the council nonetheless, discussing a busy month of August and larger fire department needs.

“There’s no great time to fight fires,” Sullivan said of August conditions. “…But a hot, humid August in the mid 90s is definitely not our first choice.”

The Breakheart fires, scorched over 80 acres in the reservation, serving as a nearly unprecedented incident for some of the region’s fire departments, Sullivan said.

Both he and Purcell said they had never seen fires of such a scale at any point in their careers.

While Sullivan said he had seen helicopter crews conducting training exercises for firefighting operations, he had never seen crews in operation over a live fire. That changed last month when Wakefield officials helped coordinate National Guard water-drop flights over the fires.

Though the individual fires at Breakheart all burned in Saugus, Wakefield firefighters continually provided mutual aid, Sullivan said. They joined a large complement of firefighters from other municipalities and agencies working amid what was a brutal stretch of drought-fanned fires across the state.

“It was a very impressive display of mutual aid that was there,” Sullivan said.

“Everyone worked together,” he continued.

There were concerns through the response. Among them, Sullivan said state fire resources through the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) were running close to maximum capacity on some occasions especially as other large fires burned in Lynn, Marlborough and elsewhere.

“The amount of state resources that were tied up during that period was kind of alarming,” Sullivan said. “It was at the point where, if they had many more fires, they would have been overwhelmed.”

Patch has reached out to the DCR for comment on its level of resource availability during the Breakheart fires.

In the meantime, DCR Chief Fire Warden Dave Celino previously discussed dangers facing firefighters at locations including Breakheart in an interview last month. Sullivan echoed some of those concerns on Monday, saying he had been worried about injuries either from heat exhaustion or falling forest debris as fires burned into soil and through shallow root systems.

“There was a very high potential for trees to collapse and fall over,” he said.

There were no such injuries during the Breakheart response, Sullivan said.

Altogether, though, Sullivan said that Breakheart fires killed “hundreds” of trees, leaving burned areas vulnerable to windstorms which could knock over fragile dead trunks in the coming weeks and month.

Areas of the reservation remained closed to the public as of Tuesday as a result, more than 10 days after the DCR partially reopened Breakheart.

Outside of Breakheart and major house fires on Eastern Avenue and Jackson Lane last month, overall call volumes in Wakefield are set to push well past a milestone of 4,000 annual calls that Wakefield first passed last year, according to Purcell.

“We are getting spread thin,” Purcell said.

With EMS resources also under strain he added that the fire department is often pushing to get to scenes even faster than was typical in the past.

Purcell attributed the call volume increase to a number of factors, including the easing of COVID-19-era anxieties about going to the hospital, and the ongoing pace of residential development in Wakefield.

Sullivan and Purcell thanked the town for recent work to add a firefighter to regular tower company staffing.

Despite increasingly vertical development, fire department leaders added that their equipment still generally lets them respond safely and effectively to incidents.

Questions loom, however, potentially prompting a future need for a new fire station and a new engine company for Wakefield.

“I don’t think that’s out of the question,” Sullivan said. “But how long it takes to get to that point depends on how much development there is and how our town is affected by it.”