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Firefighter’s union presentation
While much of the information had been presented before, Ritter also said that, after the City laid off a paramedic earlier this year, overtime for the department has risen, negating any savings the City thought it could get.
At the Lions Club, two dozen were in attendance, more than half made up of firefighters, volunteers and their families. There was apparently (I only caught the end of the Q&A) a spirited debate between Ritter and Al Lizakowski, the outspoken critic of the lid lift levy. There is actually quite a bit of common ground between Lizakowski and the firefighters. He agrees that they should be fully staffed, but thinks that ambulance billing can pay for the current staffing, and more, without more taxes. “What we don’t agree with Al,” Ritter later said, “is he’s trying to play averages. . . I told him, ‘On that day when you quit breathing, do you want to play the averages?’”
Bud, If look at our call logs, and statements made by our fire department personnel, you would hear that they cannot respond until they have enough people. Also, many times it is the police department personnnel that are there first. In fact, many times, our police are the first responders to many of Ocean Shores calls. So, before you attack like a fool, the article I quoted, among many out there, tells you that they are many times significant contributors to the whole solution. We have new people here, volunteers here, and others that have just had their class and are responding. That is how people learn. And yes, they need experience. Guess where they get it. In the field. I guess the police officers on Surf Rescue only know how to drive the seadoos if you follow your logic. So, when you speak of ignorance, look in the mirror. I only choose a few cities of the MANY that do it. I did not think I had to list each and every one for you. I did want you to look out there in the paper press world, which was the source of my information, and find more yourself. That is why I said READ AND LEARN. Not Nambia. By the way, Samoa works with Australia and New Zealand in a co-operative of mutual support and training. Again, the world is bigger than you limited view of the world. There is nothing that stops them from getting continued training. Ask any of our current personnel. In fact, they stated that two volunteers are in OREGON getting traing NOW. Oh My Lord!!! They left Washington to learn something!!!
WELL GAUL,YOUR IGNORANCE HAS REALLY SHOWN WITH THIS COMMENT. YOU NAMED ABOUT FOUR CITES IN ALL THE U.S. THAT HAVE TRIED THIS, AND IM SURE YOU COULD FIND A FEW MORE, BUT HOW MANY DONT CROSS TRAIN. I BET THERE IS A REASON…..IT DOESNT WORK….HECK YOU CAN FIND STUFF TO READ ON THE INTERNET TO SUPPORT ANY ARGUMENT. GO TO NAMBLA AND READ WHAT THEY SAY. IT DOESNT MAKE IT RIGHT. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS A TRANSPORT AND THAT OFFICER IS CAUGHT OUT OF TOWN, OR WHEN THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO MAN THE STATION AND HEAVEN FORBID A COP IS NEEDED. PLUS EACH JOB REQUIRES CONTINOUS TRAINING AND TO DO THE JOB YOU NEED EXPERIENCE AFTER YOU GET YOUR CERTIFICATION TO BE PROFECIENT. I DONT WANT SOMEONE WHO JUST GOES TO A CLASS AND HAS NO EXPERIENCE TO BE THE ONE WHO SHOWS UP IF MY LOVE ONES OR MYSELF CALL 911.
How hard is it to train a police officer to man a firehose? Hold a ladder? Do CPR? Take the 120 Hour classes to become an EMT? When you have limited resources, you learn to think outside the box. Samoa, a poor island recently hit with a Tsunami does cross train. Bensenville, Il. does it. Utah Highway Patrol does it. Kalamazoo, Mich., and Sunnyvale, Calif., still do it. Woodbury, Minn. too. New Brighton, Minn. too. So, other than resistance from the union, it can be done. Read and learn. http://forums.officer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43722
First of all Gaul, how many police departments in Washington do you know of that cross-train thier officers to be fireman, secondly our police officers are under-staffed aswell, and thirdly both jobs require extensive training and we can’t expect these employees to be profecient in everything. Heck we could probably train the cops to do building permits and we could see if they could do pay roll…… oh wait we also need librarians, parks personel, road crews, and an animal control person. Get real, its not plausible. I do agree that somethings can be changed for the better and looking into these should be high on our priority list, but the people who don’t know how things are ran shouldn’t be spewing information thats wrong. Ive heard stats stated by certain individuals who are flat out wrong. Unfortunetly these are the loudest people. I dont know where they have gotten that information but the way they have aquired it has to be flawed.
I know for a FACT that alot of our residents travel 115 and 109 and they should get help from OCEAN SHORES EMTs and PARAMEDICS. Alot of our kids attend the high school aswell and they should get the best service around. In fact there was an accident today in Ocean City that involved a friend of mine and he is a Shores resident. Im glad the people who showed up to help him were our Ocean Shores guys. They were well trained and professional.
Lets think (?),
What would have been smarter (?)
a) an extra million or two for EMS
or b) The extra few thousand square feet in the 10,000 plus square feet in the new fire station office area? Duh!
Where were are heads when we were planning our overall safety net a few years ago? Hopefully, common sense prevails on November 3rd. (whatever)
The real decision as we go forward is if we are a rural community of new cadilac or old chevy drivers? Maybe we can get the advice of the new community of million dollar home owners in Pacific Beach? How grand is their fire department and EMS service?
If we had Urgent Care Facilities here, which are different from a Doctor, we would be able to reduce the number of runs to Grays Harbor Community Hospital. The issue here is the number of runs out of town to the far away hospital. Urgent Care Facilities take care of many of the emergency room issues that we currently make.
Since we have spent a fortune on our airport, we can now land medical ambulance copters there and send the trama cases directly to Harbor View.
We need to tell Grays Harbor Community Hospital that we need their support to obtain these services. We have to get the State and Federal Government to support Rural Medical needs.
We need to have all that use the service pay for it. That may mean that we tell the county people to pay up or shut up too. How standards allow us to have top rated service and them none is really interesting. Should the people outside the city be getting our service on a per call basis? NO. They should have to cover the cost, if they want it available, too. If not, forget the Mutual Aid Agreements. They are not in our best interest.
Also, if you look at other communities, even those overseas, Police are cross trained to be firefighters too. That would supplement our fire department by 11 or 12 more personnel. Also, things like building height limits, sprinklers, clearing property to provide protection from dune fires, and other actions that would limit the risk to our existing personnel and equipment limitations.
By the way, the demographics for Ocean Shores show that we are not just old people.
Also, the normal trend for gentrification is to move to places that offer the medical services needed to sustain the individual. It has happened here all the time. You always here that they move back to the city when they need more. They are then replaced with new homeowners that are more able to live here with the limited services we currently offer. Maybe we need to focus on less tourism and retirement and a more rounded economic base. Business development would bring those other businesses here to balance our tax base too.
AMEN LANCE
unfortunatley that won’t be the message sent. The only message sent will be that a retirement community without a local doctors office, and located 35-45 minutes from the nearest hospital, doesn’t realize the reality that they live in, and that not supporting a lid lift for the “ONLY” medical service (emergency or not)available to them is cutting there nose off despite their face!
on AVERAGE or 80% of the time the fire department only has 3 career firefighters on duty 2 are paramedics.So let’s take an AVERAGE day of 5 calls and let’s say they transport 3 patients to the hospital that’s 6 hours that the city has little to no fire or advanced life support coverage.
Each call takes a Paramedic unit out of service for 2 hours per transport. So an AVERAGE day here can easily become dangerous, if a ambulance is out on a transport and another critical 911 call happens, i.e. fire stroke,heart attack etc.
We should never delay patient care or response time. We should have the staff to properly and quickly respond because on AVERAGE the brain dies between 4-8 minutes with no oxygen. And on AVERAGE fire grows one and a half times it’s original size with each passing minute.
When somone calls 911 it is NOT an AVERAGE day it can be the worse day of their life. When is enough enough?? well I guess when we can meet our own ordinance that was adopted by the City SEPA#808 currently the fire department is understaffed by 50%.
FYI yes there are days when the fire department runs 5 calls and there are days when they run 15 calls. And if you AVERAGE our population locals and tourists it would be on AVERAGE 15,000. 3 firefighters per 15,000 people now that just does not AVERAGE out!!!!!
AMEN TIME 2
Playing the averages is exactly what? Living on the coast waiting for a Tsunami? Waiting for The feds, the state and the city to tax us out of existence? Thinking that if you have a medical problem that your ambulances are up in Taholah or Pacific Beach, serving these people that aren’t contributing to our standby ambulance service? Doing the math, our fire department has no more than 5 calls a day, and this is what you call playing the averages? How many paramedics is enough, 20,30,40? When do we stop playing the averages? When do we put our foot down and say that its time to stop playing games in this city, and get our act together by taking care of our own, stop taxing us into oblivion to pay for someone else’s medical services. Stop this lid lift levy and give our city administration a message that we have had enough.