
Abigail Ham – The Keene Sentinel, N.H.
It’s time to reconsider the Keene Fire Department’s staffing model, according to city and department leaders, as staffing levels have not kept pace with rising call volumes. As a result, the department often had to call in off-duty staff in 2024, which can increase response times and lead to burnout.
A group of fire and city officials has been meeting since September to begin looking for solutions. In a presentation at a Jan. 9 meeting of the City Council’s Finance, Organization and Personnel Committee, group members said they plan to ask councilors to support a grant application that could make it easier for Keene to pay for more staff.
At the meeting, Fire Chief Jason Martin said the department has reached “saturation capacity” in its ability to absorb increasing call numbers with current staffing levels.
The department took about 6,348 calls in Keene and other communities in 2024, up from 4,286 a decade before. Firefighter Robert Skrocki, president of IAFF Local 3265, the department’s union chapter, said in an email that Keene Fire is staffed to handle roughly 3,500 calls per year.
The department has contracts with other towns and provides mutual aid throughout the region, but Deputy Chief Greg Seymour said the increase in calls has been driven by EMS calls within city limits.
Four shift commanders, eight lieutenants and 32 firefighters take operations shifts at the station. A typical shift is staffed by a commander, two lieutenants and seven firefighters. Often, that’s not enough.
The department had to call in off-duty staff more than 300 times last year, according to a Facebook post by the union. That’s usually a sign the entire duty shift is committed with no additional units available.
“Nearly every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, the department recalls off duty personnel to handle emergencies that are happening in the city or to backfill additional apparatus that are not staffed to attempt to maintain the number of available units needed to handle additional emergencies in the city,” Skrocki said. “In the interest of public safety, it is important for the community to know that there are times that the City of Keene Fire Department is not able to respond to their emergencies because all of our units are already committed to other calls.”
As of Monday, high call volumes had left the department with no available units at least eight times this month, according to the union’s Facebook page.
Skrocki said this can force shift commanders to make tough decisions about which emergencies to pull resources from or send a smaller response to.
Overlapping incidents compound the problem. In 2024, about 42 percent of incidents occurred at the same time as another emergency, Skrocki said.
At the committee meeting, Deputy Chief Seymour said frequent overlap in responses leaves the department ill-equipped to respond to major emergencies. “If we had the 10 on-duty personnel to handle any one incident at any time, most of the time we would be just fine,” Seymour said. “However, when we have to split those personnel into two groups, we start to thin out our availability and our ability to handle anything major.”
When off-duty staff have to return to the station, the response time is lengthened by the amount of time it takes them to get there, a margin that can make a difference. “Anyone who has called for an ambulance or fire truck knows that every minute that we’re not there can be a big change,” Seymour said.
City Manager Elizabeth Dragon said it’s concerning how often the department is fully committed. The increasing call volume driving the issue is primarily EMS calls within the city, data presented at the meeting show, with nursing home calls having the biggest impact.
At the committee meeting, Dragon said the department’s call volume was “dramatically” impacted by DiLuzio Ambulance Service closing in 2023.
Keene’s ambulance crews have had to take over transport calls, mostly to and from nursing homes, that DiLuzio used to cover.
“The private nursing homes are really impacting us right now,” Dragon said.
A higher volume of calls from nursing homes keeps ambulances busy, which can be a problem when they’re needed elsewhere, but it’s good for the department’s bottom line. Keene Fire’s collected revenue was up in 2024 by more than $300,000, according to data shared at the meeting. Langdon Place, a Keene assisted living facility, paid the fire department more than $98,000 in 2024 — up from $19,000 in 2023. Revenue from other nursing homes also increased significantly year over year, more than offsetting the loss of a contract with the town of Westmoreland, which joined the county-run Cheshire EMS last year.
Cheshire EMS currently provides no-cost backup in Keene under an agreement struck with the city in 2023, but Dragon said the city wants to be as self-sufficient with EMS coverage as possible.
“The more we can cover ourselves I think in the long run the better off we’ll be in terms of cost and in terms of … level of service,” she said at the Jan. 9 meeting.
Dragon told the FOP committee the working group will be looking to the City Council to support an application for a grant through the Federal Emergency Management Agency that could help cover the initial cost of increasing fire department staffing. The agency’s Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grants help communities increase the number of trained firefighters available by providing 75 percent of the funding for new positions in the first and second years after they’re hired and 35 percent in the third year. This creates a three-year buffer before the municipality has to fully absorb the cost.
Skrocki said the union is committed to working with department leadership and the city to find a solution.
“We are here at the table to create a solution to the workload placed upon us with the limited number of staffed resources we have available and the saturation of calls that our members are expected to handle,” he said. “It is dangerous, it is unsustainable, and it is unacceptable.”
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