Whatever You Do, DON’T Light a Match in Reading!! November 7 2009
I’m sure Denny will be sick when he reads this:
Cutting $3 million out of the Reading Fire Bureau’s budget next year will require major cutbacks in the way the city responds to fires and ambulance calls, a worried Fire Chief William H. Rehr III said Thursday.
The expected layoffs of 16 firefighters and seven paramedics would mean one of the three ambulances will go out of service, as well as several of the 11 firetrucks now operating around the clock, including three of the four ladder trucks, he said.
Reading police and an Exeter ambulance crew at the site of a stabbing near South 16th Street and Perkiomen Avenue in July. Suburban ambulance services say they will not be able to handle a sharp rise in calls if the city takes one of its three ambulances out of service.
It would mean ambulance response times could double or triple. The city would have to end standby ambulance service for the Reading Phillies, scholastic football games and events at the Sovereign Center, and stop providing mutual aid to surrounding municipalities even as it depends more on those outlying companies for help in the city.
It also would mean the end of dispatching EMT-trained firefighters along with the paramedics to medical calls. The firefighters usually respond first, usually within four minutes, because firehouses are spread around the city and the ambulances are based downtown.
But Rehr said the numbers he was given mean he has to cut seven paramedics and 16 firefighters, and figure out what the city can do, and can’t do, with the rest.
The first to go is the first-responder system. If the EMT-trained firefighters respond to a medical call, but the two city ambulances are tied up at a local hospital, the EMTs have to baby-sit the victim until an ambulance gets there, he said.
“We can’t pull them off for a fire; that’s abandoning the patient, and that’s grounds for malpractice,” he said.
The solution: Don’t send them in the first place.
Second to go are the mutual-aid agreements with the West Reading and Kenhorst fire companies.
“For the most part, we’ll have to stop mutual aid,” he said. “Will that be reciprocal? I don’t know yet.”
On the ambulance side, the city handles 12,000 calls a year or 4,000 calls per ambulance – already over the 3,500-call-per-ambulance national standard. Take out an ambulance, and the calls-per-ambulance rise.
“We can’t do 6,000 calls per ambulance,” Rehr said.
He noted the EMS Council has already warned the city that it has what it calls grave concerns about the city’s ability to handle the call volume with two ambulances.
So will the surrounding services be asked to take an extra 4,000 city calls?
“The surrounding community ambulance services have said they’d have difficulty absorbing city calls, and they can’t afford adding staff to do that,” Rehr said. “Mutual aid is a fragile arrangement. But it (asking for help) will happen more often as we cut fire and EMS.
“We’re going to expect others to do our work.”
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