By Martin B. Cassidy
Staff Writer
September 26, 2005
Following recommendations made in a report in the aftermath of a 2003 blaze where three firefighters were seriously injured, the town is hiring seven firefighters this week.
"One of my goals is I would like to increase the manpower on the department because I feel we could be more proficient if we had more people," Fire Sanford Anderson said.
Some firefighters will fill four vacancies caused by the creation of four new deputy chief positions. The deputy chiefs will take charge of daily firefighting operations that previously fell to a lieutenant assigned as shift commander for a 24-hour shift, Anderson said.
That lieutenant will be reassigned to respond to fires on an engine out of headquarters, Anderson said. Three new hires will replace retiring personnel, Anderson said. All seven firefighters were hired Thursday.
The change was recommended by the 12-page report from the Davis Avenue Independent Fire Review Panel, which called for additional supervision and a clearer chain of command as necessities for the Greenwich Fire Department. The report also recommended putting a supervisor on each fire engine during a shift, consolidating career firefighters on fewer engines so two trucks, each manned with four firefighters, could respond to all fires.
Anderson wants to increase the number of firefighters overall, and is considering other possibilities to reorganize manpower.
Ideally, Anderson said, each fire engine would have four firefighters, with one of them being a lieutenant to supervise the crew.
"My eventual goal is I would like to increase the career men in the department, to have more people, an officer on each front line truck," Anderson said. "Some of our engines now have two firefighters with no officer in charge, and I'd at least like to have an officer in charge of each apparatus on the road."
Five firefighters were injured during the Dec. 5, 2003, fire at 312 Davis Ave., three of them seriously, when they were forced to jump from a third-story window while searching the second and third floors of the house for two small children thought to be inside.
Deputy Fire Chief Mike Puterbaugh, who broke both legs in jumping from the window that night, said the addition of the deputy chiefs, and reassigning the lieutenant to another fire engine, will improve operations and safety.
How to deploy firefighters and the hiring of additional personnel are two major issues in coming years, Puterbaugh said.
"We may be looking at the way we station some of our personnel in the future," Puterbaugh said. "We're open to changing things to provide the best coverage we can."
Puterbaugh said that in the fiscal year just concluded, the fire department logged more than $1 million in overtime to fully staff fire houses when personnel were injured, out sick, or on vacation.
"That's the approximate breaking point where adding personnel rather than paying overtime makes sense to cover vacancies," Puterbaugh said.
First Selectman Jim Lash said that the department will move gradually toward adding additional career firefighters, and that there has been no discussion about major hirings.
"First we have to fill the deputy chief slots and be more active recruiting volunteers before we sit down and talk about how we want to operate," Lash said.
The construction and opening of the King Street fire station within a few years is the next planned addition of career staff, but more immediately, filling the empty position of volunteer recruitment retention coordinator will result in a greater number of firefighters, Lash said.
"Increasing the number of volunteers will be important to improving manpower," Lash said.
The adoption of a combined civilian police/fire and emergency medical dispatch will put former dispatchers back into active firefighting duty, Lash said.
The Cos Cob, Sound Beach, Byram, and Glenville firehouses are currently only manned with two-man crews each 24-hour shift, requiring them to wait for another truck with two or more firefighters to arrive before starting to fight a fire.
Lt. John Novak, president of Firefighters Local 1042, said the creation of the deputy chief positions will help resolve issues of who is in charge of directing personnel at fires.
"It makes the chain of command better," Novak said. "Currently you have four lieutenants who are all equal and whoever gets there first takes over command."
The union, which represents Greenwich's 97 paid firefighters, has pressed the town in contract negotiations to put four firefighters on each engine and increase the number of firefighters per 24-hour shift.
While the union would prefer it was achieved by hiring more people, Novak said, the town could also do it by reassigning career firefighters to fewer engines, or putting more firefighters on duty.
"My ideal would be to have a boss and three firefighters on each piece of equipment," Novak said. "It doesn't mean they have to hire guys, they could redeploy the personnel."
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