Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
Print
E-Mail
tool name
closeTuesday, Jul. 07, 2009
Pasco approves 'automatic aid' pact on fire calls
By Joe Chapman, Herald staff writer
The Pasco Fire Department and its counterparts across the Columbia River are bolstering their ability to work together across jurisdictional lines.
An "automatic aid" agreement the Pasco City Council approved Monday will let dispatchers call the city's fire personnel and trucks into neighboring jurisdictions and vice versa.
Pasco has had a mutual aid agreement with the neighboring jurisdictions for more than 20 years, but the agreement required the fire department asking for aid to put in a request and for the shift commander of the responding department to approve its resources being sent to help.
"The intent is to get it going faster under most circumstances, and not build in a delay of contacting people," said Pasco Fire Chief Bob Gear.
Asking for aid can add two to five minutes to the time it takes to get mutual aid, and in one case this year, it took as long as 11 minutes, Gear wrote in a memo to Pasco City Manager Gary Crutchfield.
A fire department tends to get help from neighboring departments when its resources are divided among multiple calls.
A national standard is for a fire department to send 15 people to a house fire and 20 people to a commercial fire. Pasco's minimum standard is to send 12, but on half of the house fires in which property was lost in 2008, the department sent less than that because it was responding to several calls at once, Gear reported.
Only Kennewick Fire Department has the personnel to meet the national standard, and that's when it's not handling multiple calls, Gear said.
The Kennewick and Richland fire departments and Benton Fire Districts 1, 2 and 4 have had automatic aid agreements with one another since 2007.
It will benefit Pasco as well as those departments to extend the agreement to Pasco Fire Department, said Kennewick Fire Chief Neil Hines.
The blazes the districts have battled in the past week or two during the Fourth of July holiday and the start of fire season show the need for interlocal aid, Hines said.
"There isn't one of these big fires that all of those agencies haven't been on the scene," Hines said. "And really we're only one fire away from having a disaster because we're all tied up."
The automatic aid agreement with Pasco will go before the Richland City Council for approval today and the Kennewick City Council in a workshop meeting next week. Commissions for Benton Fire Districts 1, 2 and 4 also will consider the agreement.
Crutchfield cautioned the Pasco City Council that the fire department's overtime costs could increase from the agreement and that the staff would monitor the expense.
Gear said the agreement will allow the departments to decline offering aid if their personnel already are involved with other calls.
-- Joe Chapman: 582-1512; jchapman@tricityherald.com
@Nyx.CommentBody@