Circleville – During the Circleville Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday night in the Circleville Council Chambers Circleville Fire Chief gave an update on how the fire department is doing.
The Chief started off his report by giving the raw number of runs at the end of May at 1839 since January 1st of 2023, 431 of those runs were in May for an average of around 14 runs a day during that month. Thompson said that the department is on track to be around the same if not a little more runs than it did in 2022.
Thompson reported that the Fire department is currently fully staffed, but he did say that they may be losing a firefighter to another department in Columbus soon, but currently have eight candidates that have already been background checked by the human resource department in queue. He said that lateral transfers have done well for the Department hiring six from the safer grant, four of them already experienced paramedics.
The chief said that because of that and holding onto more firefighters at the department they now have a good pool of experienced people on the department.
“Yeah, we used to be top-heavy with just basic EMTs now we are top-heavy with paramedics, we’ve got a good pool of experienced people, one of the individuals we hired through the lateral transfer had 14 years of experience from another department as a paramedic so we were doing very well,” said Thompson.
The fire department has seen some cleanup also according to Thompson during the Memorial Day weekend the guys landscaped and mulched the department and even brought in personal power washers to clean the block around the building. Thompson said that they are currently putting in new flooring replacing the original flooring from 21 years ago that they were having issues with during cleaning and having it lift off the concrete.
“The new flooring will be a laminate plank So it won’t hold germs it will be easier to clean, and that’ll help us out tremendously when it comes to decon on the station.”
Chief reported that due to full staffing the department has saved the city around 90,000 dollar worth of overtime hours from years past.
“Just as a something for you guys, I know, in the past, overtime has been a huge concern. We’re down 2,224 hours of overtime this year from last year. And that’s about the equivalent of a little bit less than $90,000 that we’ve saved, being a full staff having a minimum of maximum personnel.”
Currently, the department is building a new ladder truck that will replace a 25-year-old ladder truck. The cost of that truck is over a million dollars, but through that Safer Grant, a majority of that cost (95%) will be paid by the grant, not the taxpayers. That ladder is expected in the city next year.
