FARMINGTON – A draft of a joint fire service study recommends ways to design a more efficient emergency services delivery system where individual fire departments operate within the context of a larger organization.
Farmington Town Manager Richard Davis received a $10,000 grant to have a study conducted on the efficiency of delivering local and regional fire safety services. The study encompasses Farmington, Wilton, Jay, Livermore and Livermore Falls fire services.
With nearly 22,000 people spread across 205 square miles, and with a collective valuation of real and personal property worth more than $1.75 billion, these individual fire departments have a unique opportunity to blend their attributes into a cohesive system, said Neil D. Courtney, the protection specialist wrote in the draft study.
As a whole, the towns have: eight fire stations, 13 pumpers, one pumper/tanker, four tankers, four aerial devices, five utility/squad trucks and five brush firetrucks. These totals include the East Dixfield Fire Co.
The current total operating budgets for the departments is $551,353. That doesn’t include capital reserve accounts, bonding and consolidated municipal spending on insurances, or utilities.
The purpose for the study wasn’t to merge the five town fire departments into a single agency. but to preserve their autonomy while enhancing the delivery of services, Courtney stated.
The report offers numerous opportunities where the departments could work together to deliver services to the region’s communities as a whole, and address aspects of their administrative and managerial tasks.
The departments already provide mutual aid to each other if requested or, in some instances, automatically.
The report recommends creating a position of “regional firefighter.” These regional firefighters from any of the local departments would respond to emergency calls within the departments, Courtney stated.
A carefully crafted program qualifying how firefighters from one community would respond to a call in another town would be paramount, he stated.
Courtney also recommends consolidated dispatch services, if the towns form a stronger alliance, to deliver fire and rescue services.
A single-source modern computer-aided dispatch center would be the cornerstone of an enhanced system. It would provide a predetermined response program that would decide what firetruck would respond to fires throughout the five-town district.
Until the communities consolidate dispatch services, if they do, the Jay, Livermore Falls and Franklin County dispatch centers could consider implementing a simulcast-dispatch system. This plan would have each dispatch center capable of dispatching any of the five towns’ fire departments.
The report recommends the departments work toward a uniform set of standard operating procedures. It also suggests that the Franklin County Emergency Agency director could function as a coordinator or technical services liaison to the chiefs within the district.
Other recommendations include: group purchases, entice public works personnel to become members of fire departments, recruit nontraditional personnel to fill volunteer support roles, apply for grants and do centralized training.
The report also makes recommendations on fire stations, including having Jay and Livermore Falls integrate into a new single facility but maintaining department identities. Another suggestion is relocating a pumper truck from Chesterville to the Farmington Falls Fire Station and Farmington moving its engine company to a new location in the northern section of town to bolster response time and fire protection.
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