Owensboro Fire Department presented its annual report for the 2019-20 fiscal year during Tuesday’s City Commission meeting, including how they dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic as part of their emergency response.
The 2020 year started “upbeat,” OFD Chief James Howard said, but guidelines from the CDC and government officials caused the department to lose some ground on education and fire safety courses, many of which had taken place at local schools in years past.
Still, the fire department was credited for saving more than $6 million in property by putting out fires.
On another positive note, OFD was able to hold its first EMT training course needed for the department to obtain advanced life support licensing, something that had been in the works for years.
While some expenses increased over the year, others dipped. Howard said costs in the “other” category — including safety costs, training, insurance and COVID-related expenses — increased by 26%.
Fire statistics were on par with the previous year, Howard noted, with firefighters responding to 295 fire incidents in 2020 versus 299 in 2019.
Structure and vehicle fires were up slightly from year to year, while EMS calls increased by 7% 2020 — a “significant bump” from 2019, Howard said.
“By our estimation, this could be explained by COVID-related symptoms and circumstances because respiratory symptoms and circumstances increased by about 9% from year to year,” he said.
OFD responded to 8,677 total calls over the fiscal year, with more than 75% involving medical calls and rescue incidents. The average response time in 2020 slowed by two seconds in 2020 to 4 minutes and 36 seconds — an issue being addressed by OFD, Howard said.
“That’s from the time that we get going down at the station to our personnel showing up on your doorstep,” he said. “That’s pretty close [to last year], but we don’t like to backslide even a couple seconds, so this is a statistic that will be worked on with our performance metrics in the fire station.”
Howard said OFD hoped to achieve a number of goals in 2021. The first, he said, was to recover from the pandemic with adaptive policies to maintain safety in operations.
Over the next year, OFD also hoped to obtain status as an Advanced Life Support (non-transport) Agency, plan and provide response for the Owensboro Airshow and HydroFair, and replace and update equipment.
The full report can be viewed on OFD’s website.
