By Tony Brockmeyer
First Capitol had an opportunity to interview St. Charles Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes regarding the fire study commission recently set up by St. Charles County Councilman Dan Foust.
FIRST CAPITOL NEWS (FCN)
On November 9, 2004 the St. Charles County Council appointed a fire study commission to determine what effect a county wide fire district would have on the delivery of fire services and the effect a county wide emergency services district would have on the fiscal capacity and financial viability of fire services throughout the county, and the economic impact on taxpayers throughout the county resulting from such proposed consolidation.
FIRE CHIEF ERNIE RHODES (CR)
That’s a really good question. I guess that is the whole reason for the commission study. First of all I think there is always a better way to do something and in the City of St. Charles as far as fire, EMS and rescue and a vast array of technical services the fire services are responsible for, I think we do a really good job. I think if there is a better way to provide a service we should look at it.
FCN: Do you think that a county wide service would be more efficient than your department is now.
CR: It is hard to tell. I am an advocate for the taxpayers of this community to make sure the quality of fire service, rescues, EMS, is very strong. I think we have that right now. But many people ask. What do you think? How do you feel? Would this be a benefit to the city? Right now I can’t say it would be or it wouldn’t be because I haven’t seen their plan. I don’t know what their plan is to number one maintain the service to increase the service or decrease the service or maintain the tax level. Increase the service and decrease the tax level. I haven’t seen their plan so it is hard for me to say if I am against it or for it. I do know one thing. We provide a very strong service to this community right now and I am totally against anything that would compromise that service.
FCN: What is your personal expectations on how many minutes will pass from the time someone calls to report an emergency to the time one of your units will respond?
CR: You can break this down into several sections. Number one is dispatch time. Number two is turnout time and number three is response time. It is hard for me to control the dispatch time because I don’t oversee dispatch. I think there are a lot of variables. When a caller calls it is hard for the dispatcher to get a good history of what is going on and then dispatch the equipment. It takes time to dispatch, load it into the CAD, the CAD chooses the equipment, then set off the tones, all the tones go out and then the turn out. Time for the national standard is about one minute. Per national standard there should be no more than a four-minute response time. That means when the trucks acknowledge they are responding they get on the scene within four minutes. That is pretty important and this is why. When you look at how do we design service, how do we design fire service you want to look at benchmarks.
The one good benchmark out there is called flashover. That all deals with the dynamics of fire growth. A fire goes through several stages of development. The one stage it will go through regardless of what is burning and length of time it is burning is flashover. If we have a house on fire and the fire starts in the corner, it will go to flashover. That is usually anywhere between four to eight minutes. What we want to do is get a fire truck on the scene within four minutes because we want to be there to put water on the fire before it reaches flashover. Once it goes to flashover it leaves the room of origin, which means more manpower to put it out. More water, more damage and really it compounds any search and rescue effort. So in the city of St. Charles we have a little over a four-minute response time. That is the national standard. That is very precious. We are very fortunate. We can get a fire truck on the scene and you would be surprised how many times we go to a fire and it starts small we get there quick enough to hold it. We save the house. We prevent that from becoming a working fire. We should go by the national standards. They are based on science and data. Not based on Ernie Rhodes’s interpretation of what is right and what is wrong.
FCN: What percentage of the time does your department meet that response time?
CR: I would say probably 90 percent, which is a pretty good percentage.
FCN: Do you have any areas where the response time is longer?
CR: There is an area of concern. It would be the northwestern quadrant of the City. Around the Truman Boulevard area. We rely 100 percent on mutual aid from Central County Fire District at that station. Based on the comments of Chief Johnson from Oregon who the commission brought in, you really want to rely on mutual aid up to 15 percent and I agree with him because we do not have control of that fire station. That fire station does not have a paramedic on the fire truck either. So if there were an area of the city that concerns me about a response time it would be that geographical portion of the City.
FCN: Once your firefighters have received a call how long does it take them to get on the road?
CR: It depends on the call. I have seen times of 10 seconds all the way up to a minute and 40 seconds. What is important is that you need to identify those times came from dispatch. Calculated in those times is also dispatch time. Probably the turn out time on a fire is right around a minute. It can take up to 30 to 40 seconds to dispatch an alarm with all the trucks so that time is figured in. The County fire chiefs as a whole are looking at that right now thinking we need to recalculate and do it appropriately by national standards. Dispatch time is dispatch time. Turn out time is turn out time and response time is response time. Right time the dispatch and turn out times are intertwined so it is hard to get a really clear objective look at that.
FCN: Would it be more efficient if you had you own dispatchers?
FCN: I don’t thinks so. County Alarm and Dispatch since Bob Watts has taken over as the leader, has improved greatly. I think they are doing a good job. I don’t think us taking over our dispatch would improve our response time.
FCN: How many firefighters do you have on each unit?
FCN: We have a minimum of three firefighters on every fire truck and ladder truck. The national standard calls for four firefighters but we have a minimum of three. Some days we could have more because if we have folks who are not sick or on vacation we could have up to four guys.
FCN: How do simultaneous calls affect your turn out?
CR: Obviously it depends on how many calls come in at one time. The more calls the thinner our service delivery. That very seldom happens, but what we do have is automatic mutual aid with Central County and basically every fire department in the metropolitan area. It is all flawlessly integrated through the 911 CAD systems. For instance, if station five is out of service and the next closest fire truck is a Central County fire truck, it is automatically dispatched so there is no delay in response time.
FCN: If I live in the City, but I live closer to a fire station that is out of the city, when I report an emergency, which fire unit is dispatched first?
CR: Myself and Chief Mason of the Central County Fire District have a fantastic working relationship. We share common standard operating guidelines. One of those is the first alarm response. If there is property or life endangerment Russ doesn’t care and I don’t care what it says on the side of the truck. What is important is to get someone there. We send the closest truck. If Central County is closer to your house and the city station closest to your house is out of service we will send the closest truck period.
FCN: What level of service does your department provide for emergency medical service?
CR: When I first became fire chief here in the city there was a little controversy on EMS between County Ambulance and our EMS units. Since then we have had a really good relationship and we use both those units. We use the closest life support unit. The former chief of the County Ambulance Service said if you are going to have a medical emergency you want to have it in the City of St. Charles because they have access to four ambulances and we have a paramedic on every fire truck. We can get you a paramedic in four minutes. That is another good benchmark. Based on human physiology, four to six minutes of a life threatening injury you can have irreversible brain damage that will affect your quality of life for the rest of your life. If we can get a paramedic on the scene within four minutes we can greatly enhance your survival. And that is important. We are the only fire department in the county that provides that.
FCN: If they made a countywide fire department would that hold true for whatever trucks were covering the City of St. Charles?
CR: No it would not hold true.
FCN: There was an accident a couple of weeks ago on Highway 94 at Zumbehl Road. There were several ambulances and two emergency airlift helicopters there. What determines when an emergency helicopter is called for transportation?
CR: If it is a prolonged extraction or if it is a significant life threatening injury, that meets the criteria to go to a level one trauma center. St. John’s Mercy, Barnes downtown and St. Louis University Hospitals are Level 1 Trauma Centers. If they have a significant injury we call medical control, which is St. Joseph’s Hospital, to converse with the physician there and we follow our protocol that meets that criteria. That is what determines if we fly somebody out. A lot can also depend on traffic conditions.
FCN: Who makes that call?
CR: The paramedic on the scene goes by the protocols and confers with medical control at St. Joseph’s Hospital so it is a combined decision.
FCN: There has been some talk about changing the locations of the fire stations. What are your thoughts on that?
CR: Our mission statement says, “Service Without Boundaries, Compassion and Integrity in all we do and the Courage to move forward. With all the controversy with the Consolidation Commission we still have to remember that here in the city of St. Charles we have a fire service to provide. Right now, with the city growing, we are talking to the Public Safety Committee of the Council to start working with the Council on the fact that we have a city that is growing and do we have to start relocating fire stations. If we relocate several stations I think we can address that coverage issue on the northwestern quadrant of the city by Truman Boulevard and Ehlmann Road. The area of the city that is not well protected. For fires right now it is protected by Central County. They have a good fire service. But they don’t have a paramedic on their fire truck. As fire chief, I do not have any control over that fire station so when they have a fire and that truck is out of service, nobody calls Ernie and tells me so I can move equipment around to cover our City. We don’t know. We don’t have control. That is why we need to shift our fire stations around the City to make sure we can still provide coverage to the residents in that area of the city. I want to stress that we are not advocating building a sixth fire station and hiring twelve new people. I don’t think we want to do that, but I am advocating we start to talk about, can we relocate fire stations and provide equal service across the whole City of St. Charles. That is what we are looking at. We are strictly talking about it. There have been no decisions made. We are working with the Council trying to identify some areas of concern as the fire department looks at it to be objective to make sure we are providing a good service.
FCN: As New Town grows do you think that will necessitate the addition of a fire station?
ER: If you look at the rooftops that will be in there and I have heard of two different formulas. Two point one person per rooftop and two point six. We are going to have 15,000 people or so in New Town. You will have a small city up there. We plan on moving station four into New Town. That has been on the Capitol Improvement Plan for several years now, even before I came here as fire chief. We plan on moving that station to New Town. It is going to be a very dense area so we are going to put a fire station in there. In several years, 10 or maybe 15 years, we may not need any more fire stations but we may need to put another fire truck in service with a manned crew at a busy fire station. For instance, if we move station four into New Town and that truck is out of service, like six hours a day running calls, we may need to get another fire truck there to make sure we are there to cover the other calls. I can see the city of St. Charles in 10 or 15 years maybe hiring another pumper crew but not building a sixth station. Right now, if we can just move the stations, I think it will definitely save money for the city versus the easy fix. Putting a fire station up at Ehlmann and hiring twelve fire fighters. We want to be responsible. I know the Council wants to be financially responsible and we want to do that.
FCN: Your physical resources such as fire vehicles, training facilities, personal protective safety equipment, are they all adequate?
CR: Yes they are. We have state of the art protective gear, which allows our firefighters to go in deeper and be more aggressive in fire attack and rescue situations. We have got a great bunch of guys. They are dedicated firefighters. They work so hard for this community. They are not only firefighters they are paramedics. They can turn their hat around. If somebody has a bad car wreck they can take care of him or her. If somebody has a bad car wreck with the car on fire they can do both. They not only do that they do hazardous material response. Technical rescue, water rescue, building collapse, confined space rescue. We have to be so ready, because when somebody calls for help and we can’t fix it, who are they going to call? So we have to bear that burden to know it all. And we do that.
FCN: The other night I noticed a tow truck towing one of your units down Kingshighway. What kind of plans do you have for repair or replacement of your equipment?
CR: That was the old ladder truck that we traded in. The council approved the purchase of a new ladder truck, which we definitely need in the city. It is going to a broker in Alabama. As far as maintenance, the fire department provides it’s own maintenance. We save a lot of money by having our own mechanics and taking care of our own trucks.
FCN: If the taxpayers spent more money to make improvements in the fire department how much of that money would you estimate would come back through lower insurance premiums?
CR: You are referring to the ISO rating. Right now the city is a class four ISO rating. That is an independent service, a grading system that the insurance companies use to identify the ability of your local fire department and we are a class four. If we decrease to a class three the residents will not see a decrease in their insurance premiums but business will. We are in the process of getting a reevaluation of our ISO rating and we are hoping to decrease that classification. Which will be good for the business owners. Anytime we can save cost in insurance premiums we need to do that. We are looking at that and we are preparing to try to lower the rating.
FCN: In your personal opinion, as a professional fire chief, in the event the county would decide they wanted a countywide fire department, do you think it would require a tax increase or would there be a tax decrease for the taxpayers?
CR: I would have to look at their plan. If we were going to maintain our benchmarks in the City of St. Charles with a little over four minute response for fires and rescue and emergency medical services, I would say it would probably be a tax increase for a lot of people across the county because that is a pretty high standard to make. If the plan is less than that, I don’t know. It is hard for me to say because I don’t know their plan. I haven’t seen where it is broken. If it is broken tell me where it is broken so I can fix it.
FCN: A lot of people are not familiar with you Chief. Would you please give us your background?
CR: I have been in the fire service for 22 years as a firefighter. I have been a paramedic for roughly 19 years. I was with the Maryland Heights Fire District and went up the ranks there. I have been here for a little over two and one half years. I am also a rescue manager for one of 28 Federal Urban Search and Rescue Teams. I have a lot of experience in Urban Search and Rescue Disaster Response Operations. I have a Bachelors Degree in Applied Behavioral Science. Numerous certifications, firefighter one, two, three. Fire officer certifications, technical certifications in all Urban Search and Rescue. Tony, this is all I know. I eat sleep and breathe the fire service. I am really a very family oriented guy and I really like to serve the folks of this municipality.
FCN: Last year there was an election and there was a turnover on the City Council and the new Council came in with a goal of trying to save taxpayers money. We have noticed a lot of the City department heads were openly defiant and hostile towards the Council and resisted those efforts. But we have never heard anyone say a bad word about Ernie Rhodes. We have heard nothing but praise. What do you attribute that to?
CR: Oh my goodness. I can’t speak for anybody else but I know I work for Allan Williams and the elected officials who run the City of St. Charles. All I need to do is listen to what they need. Listen to what their constituents need and align our resources to make sure it happens. I guess I am just mindful of where I am at in the process of city government. I am a servant. I try to give my objective opinion and if there is a better idea then we go with that idea.
FCN: Putting aside the county study, if things continue the way they are where St. Charles has it’s own fire department, what do you see in the future for the St. Charles taxpayers?
CR: I do not necessarily see a tax increase. Maybe I am not in a position to foresee that. I see us maintaining our level of service. I see in the future that if we can move fire stations and spread out a standard of response equally across the city as being very important to the city residents. I see us being able to maintain our service if we can do that. If we can’t do that, then I as a fire chief say that we need to build that other station up around Ehlmann and then man that station. I see maybe in the next 10 to 15 years putting on an additional crew at an already existing station because of call volume. Other than that we provide every service we possibly can. We provide a very strong fire protection service. A very strong EMS service. A very strong rescues service. I think for a department our size we are really maximizing our resources. I am proud of our fire department. Proud of the men and women and I know that my firefighters are proud to serve to pursue our mission. That is Service without Boundaries, Compassion and Integrity in all we do and the courage to move forward.
FCN; You made a statement at one time that if someone has an emergency and it does not involve a gun, call the fire department. Do you still subscribe to that?
CR: Absolutely. If people need help in this City, call the fire department. Just like when the storm came through last July. My guys got the chain saws out and went door to door and began cutting trees down for the people. We were never out of service. When an emergency came in, they put the saws back in their trucks, they went to the emergency and they came back. That is what we are here to do. We are here to help people. My guys help people. And I want them to help people.
FCN: Do you have anything that you want to tell our readers that I haven’t thought to ask you?
CR: Tony, you are pretty thorough. I believe you covered all the bases. I appreciate the opportunity to present a little input on what is going on with reorganization. We are just trying to make sure that we maintain the level of fire service for the citizens of St. Charles. We are not necessarily against it. We would just like to say that if the recommendations are consolidation we would like to have the opportunity to opt in. To evaluate the financial impact. To evaluate the impact on service. We have some very strong benchmarks. A four-minute response time for fire and emergency medical services. That is very precious.
