The Safety and Licensing Committee met 03/09/2022. It was a brief meeting. After dispensing with the action items by formally voting to deny the Intoxicated Bartender Resolution and approving all of the license applications, they moved on to the 2021 Annual Report For the Appleton Fire Department which was presented by Fire Chief Jeremy Hansen.
In 2021 the fire department continued to ride the ebbs and flows of Covid 19, and they only stopped wearing masks about a week before the committee meeting. Fire Department members helped staff the Covid clinics at both the Expo Center and the Best Buy location.
During Covid, they continued to complete their fire inspections as normal because society had opened up a little bit. They also started to phase in some of their public education events. Prior to Covid, through their education efforts, the fire department had a population touch of around 17,000. That dropped down to around 600 in 2020. In 2021 it was up to just over 3,000. He said they were still ramping that back up, and as the world opens up a little more so will their public education.
Typically, they had their most contacts during October during which Fire Prevention Week takes place. The AFD calls it Fire Prevention Month. During 2021 a large number of their tours and contacts with students were missed, but they plan to be going full force in 2022.
Incident wise, he said, “we responded to the most incidents in our history 6,841.” He noted that it is not uncommon for them to send multiple units to an incident. Some medical calls might get only one vehicle, but for a car accident they usually send three vehicles. When a structure fire happens basically the entire city responds to that call. They only fill out one incident report per incident and then have supplements from each responding unit.
He stated, “What’s interesting about that number of incidents is it was up 15.7% from the year before. Since 2018 our incidents have gone up almost one third, and medical incidents have gone up 32% as well. So, in a nutshell, three out of every four of our incidents or roughly 73% are medical calls that we go on.”
The Fire Department’s emergency response times held steady even though they had an increase in calls. They measure their response capability with what they call the “90th percentile.” Basically 9 out of 10 times (90% of the time) they will response by that time or earlier. The national benchmark for fire departments is to respond within 4 minutes 90% of the time. “Currently we only have one station that meets that. Our main station is at 3 minutes and 7 seconds, and then we go all the way up to 5 minutes and 17 seconds throughout the other 5 stations.” He did note that two stations were very close at 4 minutes 15 seconds and 4 minutes 24 seconds respectively.
He went on to explain that there were a couple reasons for that.
- How busy was a particular area and did a fire truck from another location within the city have to respond to the call? That does increase the length of time.
- What was the size of the district a station was covering? Station 6 on the north side of Appleton and Station 2 on the southeast side cover the two largest districts. There are areas in those districts where they will never hit a four-minute response time because of the size of the area. Another example was the AAL/Thrivent location. That created a big hole in that district that trucks always have to go around which, in turn, affected their response time.
One of the most common things they are called out for is for falls of all types be they slipping in the shower or tripping over a rug. Calls for falls account for almost 800 calls a year, 16% of total calls. Prior to Covid, they had started a fall prevention program, but right after they built the framework for that program, Covid hit, and everything shut down. That was an area which they would be ramping up again. It’s an educational program in which residents voluntarily ask for fire department staff members to enter their home to perform a fall assessment, in which they check the location of handrails, rugs, and things people can trip over. They will be moving forward with that program in the coming months and years.
The last area he hit on was training, stating that the members of the Fire Department were highly trained. They had around 27,000 hours of training in 2021 which equated to just under 300 hours per staff member over the course of the year.
He then opened things up for questions.
Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) said that when looking at the total dollar loss by month, the highest loss month was in April. She wondered if it was typical to see fires in early spring. She had been under the impression that that was more common around Christmastime.
Chief Hansen responded that their high fire times were around Thanksgiving and through January because that was when the cold first hit. Cooking fires were also notorious around the holidays as one would expect.
He went on to say that the fire loss data was all over the board every year because if there is one big fire someplace that will skew the numbers for that month. He used the example of the Author’s Kitchen + Bar fire in 2019. That was a multi-million dollar loss, and whenever that sort of loss happens it would be the spike for the year.
There were no other questions from the committee.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=913980&GUID=C83A4AC4-626A-4445-ACA7-78C0B29C4D21
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