Council approves new firefighter position
Healdsburg Fire Chief Jason Boaz knows that the first few minutes after a call are make or break.
“The first five to 10 minutes of a fire are probably when it’s most dangerous, and the most likely that you are going to need to perform a rescue,” he said.
According to staff reports, in the last four years the number of incidents the fire department responds to jumped from 1,320 in 2014 to 1,834 in 2017. With the call volume going up by more than 500, keeping a full staff is increasingly vital for public safety.
Boaz said whether it’s a fire call, a medical call or a vehicle accident, there are a lot of things firefighters need to do very quickly.
“The more people, the more rapidly you can complete all those tasks, the gives you a lot more assurance of success in whatever you’re doing,” Boaz said.
Healdsburg Fire Department has a total of 13 regular staff members. City council recently approved the hire of one more firefighter at Boaz’s request with funding from Measure V, a half-cent sales tax.
With the additional help, each battalion or shift can have a three-person engine, 24 hours a day, starting in July 2018.
“It’s been one of our goals for quite a while to get that third firefighter,” Boaz said.
As of now each battalion has a captain, an engineer who can drive the truck and one additional firefighter during the day. During night calls, the additional firefighter often comes to the scene thanks to Healdsburg reserve firefighters.
“We are very lucky at Healdsburg Fire Department in that we have a very robust reserve program,” Boaz said. “They are great at covering shifts and they all have pagers so they respond in to staff additional equipment should we need it on a fire.”
Healdsburg has 21 reserve staff firefighters. Reserves are also utilized in mutual aid of shared coverage areas.
Healdsburg holds a contract with the county to provide fire service to Fitch Mountain, including all unincorporated areas on the mountain outside of the city limits. Healdsburg also holds a contract to cover the Dry Creek/Sotoyome fire district, including 65 square miles of unincorporated Sonoma County adjacent to the city in Dry Creek Valley, Bailhache Avenue to Rio Lindo and Westside Road to Sweetwater Springs.
Those combined areas generate 246 incident calls each service year.
Most of the calls (45 percent) were medical while only five percent were fire calls, according to incident statistics reports from 2014-2017.
