The Clinton Daily Democrat sat down with Fire Chief Mark Manuel to discuss the Clinton Fire Department’s annual report.
Some interesting items came up in the conversation with the fire chief: the number of calls for 2022 totaled 1353. From 2018 through 2022 that’s a 194% increase. “A part of that is medical calls,“ said chief Manuel; that is, about 49% of the calls in 2022 were EMS. As far as national averages, fire departments do tend to respond to a lot of medical calls. In fact 80% is the average. But when you start digging into the call numbers, it starts to reveal a lack of staff at CFD. For instance, the community of Warrensburg has about 40 more calls in the year 2022 than the Clinton Fire Department. They, also, had about a 49% EMS response rate. But they also have 25 full-time staff and 24 part-timers. Much like the Clinton Fire Department the Warrensburg fire department calls went up about 11% from from 2021 to 2022. Of course they have double the population of Clinton.
What the data clearly shows, however, is that the Clinton Fire Department is understaffed. The recent fire on Jefferson Street had the Clinton Fire Department calling Urich for mutual aid in order to have the minimum number of firemen on scene (as required by national fire safety standards).
Clinton Fire Department has 12 full-time staff, and are supposed to have four people per shift on duty. But for half the 2022 year, on average, they’ve been working with three full-time people on duty.
It’s an interesting situation: in the mid-70s the Clinton Fire Department was able to increase its staff to 12 full-time fireman to include two chief officers. That number hasn’t changed even though the number of calls responded to by the department, not including emergency medical situations, has increased dramatically since 1976. Just the coals from 2018 have increased over 194%. In essence the Clinton Fire Department staff structure has remained the same for about 40 years. In 2018 the Clinton fire department responded to 460 total calls. As mentioned earlier in the article, in 2022 they responded to 1353: that’s a lot of extra work for the same amount of staff.
One thing chief Manuel was proud of was that the firemen are dedicated to training hours. Every fireman is required to minimally attend 192 hours of training per year. The drivers have to attend an additional 12 hours; officers have to do 12 more than that. “They work so hard,” said chief Manuel. “I think it speaks a lot to the character of our fireman,“ he also said. All told the Clinton Fire Department fireman racked up almost 4000 hours of training in 2022.
Incident man hours for individual structure fires and events are pretty costly to the department as well - in terms of man hours. In 2022 the department had 2731 man hours on fire scenes in total. That’s about 7.5 hours per day on average. What is not understood, or often overlooked, is that: that’s just the incident man hours on scene. There’s actually a lot more man hours involved that aren’t calculated. Such as the time it takes to restock hose, medical equipment, other equipment and get the vehicles and service gear back into shape for the next call. That can take a few hours after a response to take care of.
Really, after speaking with chief Manuel, it’s pretty clear that the only real solution is to find a way to get more additional staff. But there’s a funding issue involved with that. The city council is keenly aware of the needs of the Clinton Fire Department. But short of raising the general sales tax, there aren’t many options; any additional staff that could be hired on at the fire department might cost another department some personnel or funding: that’s not an ideal solution.
The citizens of Clinton, Missouri should expect this year to have Clinton Fire Department receive mutual aid a little more often. “We are the ones that are used to typically giving aid to other departments,” said Chief Manuel. But the shortages of manpower are starting to add up. “We have to take care of ourselves, too,” said Chief Manuel. Typically, if a structure fire requires more men than are able to respond – those that are off duty have to show up. And, they may be pretty tired from the previous shift. The Clinton Fire Department personnel have always traditionally been very responsive when they are off duty to fire calls in town which require their assistance. But they are getting stretched thin. “We have lost several experienced personnel within the last couple of years,“ said chief Manuel. Some of the seasoned firemen, such as Ryan Mendenhall, Mitch Grimes, and CJ MacDonald, took opportunities elsewhere – either at another fire department, with better pay, or got out of the field entirely. Losing firemen with decades of experience means that the department has a lot of new recruits which can hamper training times. The Clinton Fire Department is still short staffed and was at the time of this interview.
As fate would have it, the fire tone sounded throughout the department in the middle of the interview: the firemen grouped up around the computer screen to see where they were headed to next. Turns out a home alarm had went off and they needed to check it out.
Off to another call.
