An issue of sustainability: Fort firefighters talk about call volume, staffing

By Kim McDarison 

Capt. Robbie Allard is a second-generation firefighter. He loves doing the job, he said, and, as a native of Fort Atkinson, he wants to serve the community, but, he admits, with the number of calls the Fort Atkinson Fire Department receives annually, it’s hard, as a paid-on-call service provider, to keep up with the demands of the job, work another full-time job, and find time for his family. 

Allard was echoing sentiments shared by Fort Atkinson Fire Chief Daryl Rausch when, on Sept 7, he presented the Fort Atkinson City Council with a proposal, outlining a new structure for the department. 

Rausch proposed a structure that would bring EMS services in-house, placing them under the management of the fire department. Additionally, it included the hiring of 12 new full-time firefighters, all of whom would also have training in EMS. Using this system, the chief said during the council meeting, the department could lessen the load on its paid-on-call staff by some 200 calls. Annually, the department answers some 500. 

Earlier this month, Fort Atkinson Online was invited to the firehouse to meet department staff and learn about the current system and how, if Rausch’s proposal is adopted, it might change. 

Allard, Rausch and full-time Division Chief Mike Lawrence assembled in the department’s on-site meeting and training room to talk about the daily job of keeping the community safe from fire and other types of emergencies for which the department receives calls.  All three employment levels within the Fort Atkinson Fire Department — paid-on-call volunteer, full-time division chief, and chief — were represented in the discussion.

The system today

Rausch said that while the fire department is authorized to have 41 paid-on-call employees, it currently has 39. There are four full-time, also called “career” positions, at the department, including those of chief and three division chiefs. The chief and the divisions chiefs handle much of the administrative work required to run the department. Paid-on-call staff, Rausch said, are responsible for everything else. 

Using the current system, Rausch said, there is one full-time person at the fire station to receive dispatches from 911. Individuals filling those roles work in 24-hour shifts. 

Rausch said calls coming in for EMS go to Ryan Brothers Ambulance Service, a Madison-based firm which has serviced the city of Fort Atkinson for 20 years. 

During the Sept. 7 Fort Atkinson City Council meeting, the council opted to terminate the provider’s contract. As part of the termination clause within the contract, the city and the provider are obligated to give one another notice of their desire the end the contract by between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30 of the year prior to the one in which services would end. The action taken by council on Sept. 7 fulfilled that obligation. As stipulated within the terms of the contract, according to city staff, Ryan Brothers will continue to serve the city until Dec. 31, 2022.

Working alongside Ryan Brothers, under the current system, is the Fort Atkinson Fire Department Rescue Squad, which, Rausch said, is made up of 25 paid-on-call firefighters. The squad is led by Lawerence. 

Strain on manpower

“Part of the strain on manpower is not just about the volume of calls, but the severity of calls has increased. Each call takes about two hours, and they (volunteers) now have training, about three trainings a month, and each one takes about two hours,” Lawrence said, adding that it takes about a year to become a certified EMT.  

Paid-on-call firefighters are also responsible for caring for the station and its equipment. For members of the department’s Apparatus Division, the group responsible for maintaining the department’s equipment, each member might find themselves putting in as many as 1,000 to 1,100 hours per year, he said. 

“We have in excess of 1,000 pieces of small equipment, and the department has 16 vehicles. There is also maintenance associated with the building. The new firehouse is 23,000 square feet,” Rausch said. He described the job as basic housekeeping, which, he said, “includes everything under the roof.” 

“Members of the Apparatus Division do everything, from cleaning bathrooms to making sure the HVAC systems work,” Lawrence said. 

In terms of call volume this year, Rausch said, “It’s been a difficult year.”  

As a captain and an EMT, Allard said, he has enough training to answer nearly all of the department’s calls. But he is also a parent — he and his wife have three children, all between the ages of 7 and 12, and he works full-time for the City of Fort Atkinson as a crew leader in the Parks and Recreation Department. 

Both of his jobs offer an on-call component and both also come with some weekend work, he said.

Paid-on-call firefighters make between $12.50 and $14 an hour, Lawrence said. 

“Most of us aren’t here for the money, that’s for sure,”  Allard said. 

Speaking for himself, he said, he enjoys serving the community. 

“This is our community. When we get a call, and we hear the address, most of us, we already know the house and who the neighbors are,” he added.  

Allard has followed his father, Bob Allard, a 40-year department veteran, into the fire department. 

“My father is a firefighter so I grew up around it, seeing it first hand,” Allard said, adding that as a kid, he liked coming to the firehouse with his father, where he developed a sense of camaraderie and community.

“It’s hard work; it’s physically demanding and mentally demanding at times. My father taught me if I make a commitment, to follow through,” he said.  

Allard said the biggest change he’s seen in the department during his 20 years of service is an increase in call volume. 

“We are down here a lot more. The calls are getting longer, and there’s paperwork,” he said.  

For officers like Allard, Lawrence said, their time commitment is increased by the required department paperwork.

Officers also share in some of the administrative duties, Rausch said. 

“With our current model, working with volunteers at our call volume, our model is not sustainable,” Rausch added. 

The paging system 

“At all times,” Rausch said, “there is one person here (at the firehouse) to receive calls from the dispatcher. Once the call comes in, a page goes out to the whole (department). 

“The volunteers come from wherever they are, home, work, and once we get enough for an initial crew, which is three people, they go out.” 

On average, Lawrence said, assembling a crew takes about seven minutes. 

“So we are out of the station about seven minutes after the 911 call comes in,” he said.  

“With an ambulance crew, it can leave with two people rather than three. It takes the same seven minutes time to get here,” he added. 

When there is a 911 dispatch for an ambulance, using the current system, Lawrence said, the page goes directly to Ryan Brothers. The company keeps two ambulances and a crew in Fort Atkinson. The crews operate from a house with a two-car garage on the south end of town, Lawrence said.  

Describing the system used by Ryan Brothers, Rausch said that of the two ambulances kept in Fort Atkinson, one is prioritized to respond to 911 calls. The other is used primarily for inter-facility transport work, meaning it could be anywhere in the broader Ryan Brothers service area, transporting patients between hospitals. Two crews, working in 24-hour shifts, also operate from the house in Fort Atkinson. 

“So we say we have 1.3 ambulances available per day,” Rausch said.  

If Ryan Brothers receives a call requiring the manpower of more than a two-man crew, they call the Fort Atkinson Fire Department for help, Rausch said. A call for help might involve lifting a patient, he said. 

“If it’s a car accident we automatically get paged with them,” Lawrence said, adding: “Sometimes they need more than two people on the ambulance, depending on the situation they are responding to, so they call us.” 

Among the paid-on-call and full-time staff at the firehouse, there are three paramedics, 17 EMTs and 5 emergency medical responders (EMRs), he said. 

The paging system is designed to call paid-on-call firefighters with the required skills to the calls for which they are needed, Rausch said. 

For fires, he said, a page might go out to the entire department, and for rescue calls, a page might go out to the rescue squad personnel. 

Currently, he said, about half of the calls the department gets are EMS- or rescue-related. 

He pointed to an aging population and a large number of managed care facilities in the community as contributing factors to the volume of EMS-related calls. 

Statistics showing aging populations are not unique to Fort Atkinson, Lawrence said. 

Nor are the challenges of servicing them, Rausch said, adding: “There are safety referendum questions happening all around us.”  

As a firefighter and EMT, Allard said, even with the added call volume and stress, he has been able to respond to between 70% and 80% of the pages. 

“It helps that I work for the city,” he said. Allard is one of about six paid-on-call volunteers that are also city employees, Rausch said.  

Still, Allard said: “When you start getting 500 calls a year, that’s a big time commitment. When the day ends, I still have to manage a family — most of us are married on the department, most of us have kids — so we have sports and daycare. My wife said one day: ‘I’m on the fire department. I just don’t respond to calls.’ When the page comes out, whatever we are doing immediately stops. She has to get the kids, or take the kids to where they were going. It puts a lot of stress on relationships. 

“Sometimes there’s a call and I’m not always able to go. If you’re at a baseball game and you are the only parent, then you can’t go, and it’s also stressful to not go. We call in and ask if there’s enough people.” 

Back at the station, Rausch said, those waiting to see who will respond are assisted by an app called “Iamresonding.” The app is installed on each firefighter’s phone. 

Said Rausch: “When the page goes out, the firefighters can respond on the app, which comes through to an electronic board at the station, and the duty commander knows how many are coming. So we watch the screen here and see who has said they are coming.” 

The call system allows the duty commander to send multiple pages as more resources are needed. 

“If after a third call, we don’t have enough, then we go to mutual aid,” Lawrence said.  

“I often say that we operate by the goodwill of the membership and the community, and the goodwill of the employers who have been willing to let their employees go,” Rausch said.  

“With just four (full-time) people, we are never going to be a career department. We are always going to be a volunteer department. I can’t order the paid-on-call people to show up,” he said. 

Established priorities

Upon his arrival to the department as chief five years ago, Rausch said, he held a “leaderless meeting,” asking department staff to help develop a list of priorities. 

“We asked: ‘What things should we work on?’” he said, adding that among identified challenges, even back then, was call volume. At that time, calls were averaging around 300 a year, he said. 

Call volume then was leading to stress, especially for employers of paid-on-call volunteers who were faced with making decisions about whether they could afford with such frequency to let their employees answer pages, Rausch added.  

“We prioritized a dozen things to work on and over the last five years, we’ve been working on it,” Rausch said, noting that the list included: improving the building, being more organized with administrative obligations, which, he said is why the department went to the division chief format, and improved communications. Much of the activity was developed to find solutions to alleviate some of the stress on the paid-on-call members without shifting the work load onto just four full-time people, he said. 

“The department has been working on this problem with increased call volume and not enough people to shoulder the workload for a long time,” Rausch added. 

Similar proposals to the one he presented on Sept. 7 have been brought to city staff by his predecessors, he said. 

Looking back at EMS history, Lawrence said, in the early 2000s, the city’s contracted ambulance service provider changed ownership, opening an opportunity for the city to consider an in-house option. A decision was instead made to contract with Ryan Brothers. 

In 2013, Rausch said, an in-house proposal was advanced by then-Chief Mike Reel. 

The proposals have been advanced as a solution for alleviating issues of call volume and manpower, Rausch said. The department works well with the Ryan Brothers’ crews, he stated.  

Further, he said, the proposals work to make better use of an ambulance that is already owned by the department. 

Currently, Rausch said, the asset is used for third-tier response, meaning that if Ryan Brothers ambulances are already out on calls, the fire department can respond to the call. 

The proposal presented to council earlier this month, he said, calls for the addition of a second ambulance that would be purchased by the city, giving the city the ability to man two ambulances that would be fully responsive to 911 calls. 

Currently, Rausch said, Ryan Brothers is responding to about 1,200 calls per year, but the number includes calls coming from rural fire districts which have contracted through the department for services as well as inter-facility calls answered by Ryan Brothers. He cautioned that the number is likely not a true representation of EMS calls coming specifically from Fort Atkinson residents. 

Looking ahead 

“We have to do something to address the load we are putting on our volunteers with the response to calls we have,” Rausch said.  

Referencing his Sept. 7 proposal, Rausch said: “This plan captures in excess of a half million dollars in transportation revenue to help offset the cost we will have to have to staff these (12 full-time) positions.” 

Filling those position would allow the department to have a daily duty crew, which, he said, would essentially staff an engine company that could answer a large number of calls without requiring additional manpower from paid-on-call volunteers. That primary duty company would include two firefighters and two EMS personnel manning each shift. 

“That gives us a four-person crew initially to respond to our calls. At least half of what we do could be done with a single engine company,” Rausch said. “That’s at least 200 calls handled without volunteers,” he added. 

It’s a burden the paid-on-call staff would not mind giving up, he said, adding that volunteers come when their skills are needed, and they are most needed for fires, and less needed for such tasks as carbon monoxide checks. 

“They still get the calls for the exciting stuff, but not the routine calls,” he said.  

The administrative and housekeeping aspects of the job could be handled by the full-time people, he added.  

Funding 

The Fort Atkinson Fire Department has an annual operating budget of $679,000, Rausch said, adding that the new firehouse was build with some change in EMS in mind. 

Looking at funding for his proposal, Rausch said, numbers were still under development and would ultimately be released by the city manager, but funding for startup costs as outlined in his presentation would come from outside the taxpayer-funded levy. 

“The startup costs could be funding through one-time funds and charitable organizations,” Rausch said, adding that when the department launched its fundraising plans in 2017 to purchase its ambulance, the community rallied to the cause. Some $125,000 was raised in two weeks, he said. Those monies paid for the new ambulance, training, and all the equipment needed to make the unit functional, he added.  

Pointing to a potential safety referendum, he said: “Our portion of that levy will be the difference between what we think it will cost to operate this service above the revenues we expect returned from transports. 911 is not profitable. The facility transports are the only part that makes money. 911 revenues will never exceed the cost to provide the service.”  

“With two dedicated 911 units, we will have the ability to work with hospitals to develop a viable para-medical program,” Lawrence said. 

Both Rausch and Lawrence noted that even when an ambulance is called, there are instances when an individual might be medically served while staying in their own home and avoiding transportation costs. A municipal-based system is better able to develop such options because it is not profit driven, they said.

Lawrence explained that as crews work with repeat patients in need of services, they can develop plans that are proactive, working with patients to avoid circumstances that would precipitate the call in the first place. 

“We can have someone here (at the department) making wellness calls as part of para-medicine and take steps to prevent that call rather than waiting for the call to come. We’ve had discussions with the hospital about this. With more EMS staff, there are more opportunities for wellness checks,” Lawrence said.  

“It’s unfortunate that a longtime provider has to be taking out of the picture, but it’s revenue we need to use in house,” Rausch said. 

Looking at broader EMS trends, he said, among EMS service providers responding to over 1,000 calls a year, few are private. “They will be municipal-based,” he said. 

An earlier story about the fire department’s proposal as presented to city council on Sept. 7 and a proposed safety referendum is here: https://fortatkinsononline.com/ryan-brothers-contract-terminated-council-rolls-out-plan-for-public-safety-referendum/.