Being a fire chief is akin to being a professional worrier.
While residents go about getting their kids to soccer, business owners plan for maintaining and growing their companies and other city leaders navigate the ever-changing politics of their municipalities, fire chiefs devote themselves to wondering and worrying about what the future may hold.
What’s the point?
However Springdale can manage it, the city must expand its fire protection capabilities.
The literary world is filled with all sorts of admonitions about the futility of worry, many of them sound. But fire chiefs by their very nature have to think about the future and consider possibilities that may never come to pass. And yet, they might, and that's reason enough to consider what's necessary to respond if they do.
Their job is preparedness, training their firefighters for the unexpected and, sometimes, the inconceivable. They ensure a community has the resources to react and anticipate the disasters nobody else wants to believe will happen.
In Springdale, Fire Chief Mike Irwin has worried for a while about the growing population and construction in his city's northwest area. Such growth is certainly not a bad or unexpected thing in Northwest Arkansas. But it brings higher demand on fire and rescue crews, and Springdale's six fire stations are positioned far enough away that getting to emergency calls can be a challenge. The closest station to that part of the fire department's response area is at Elm Springs Road near Joye Street. But the response area extends well north (almost to the J.B. Hunt complex in Lowell) and west (beyond Arkansas 112 to the west near Elm Springs).
"We have got to do something about that northwest corner," Irwin, who has been chief since 2012, told City Council members last week. "We cannot continue to have an 18-minute response time out there."
Imagine that. Eighteen minutes. Better yet, imagine waking up at 2 in the morning to an already large fire, dialing 911, then waiting 15 minutes for help to arrive. According to the federal Ready.gov website, a small flame can become life-threatening in 30 seconds. In five minutes, a home can be engulfed.
The National Fire Protection Association's standard for response time is four minutes.
It's basically as though a fire crew parked their truck 50 feet from a burning house but only brought with them 25 feet of hoses.
It's not the first time Irwin has raised the issue. Last year, Irwin said residents had identified a 6 minute, 50 second response time to 90 percent of emergency calls as acceptable. To achieve that, he said, would require a total of 10 fire stations spread across the city.
Fire stations, trucks and the equipment and manpower they require are costly. As Springdale prepares to wind down its last major bond issue, Mayor Doug Sprouse and the City Council looks to 2018 as the year they'll go to voters again, seeking continuation of a 1 cent sales tax first levied in 2004. Although still in discussions, city officials estimate near year's bond issue may total $160 million and include road improvements, a new animal shelter, a municipal campus and a park in the northwest part of the city.
Last week, a City Council committee backed inclusion of three new fire stations in the 2018 bond issue proposal, which city residents will consider at the ballot box. That would bring the city up to nine stations. If approved, two of the stations would be built to the west of Interstate 49, establishing a presence for the department in an area critically under-served.
City leaders also are examining whether the 10,000-square-foot fire stations can be metal buildings, a move that would reduce the per-square-foot cost from $450 for traditional construction to $250, a savings of about $2 million per station.
When it comes to major bond issue programs, it's entirely understandable that city leaders want to include many projects, hoping at least one or two of them will be so attractive to a city voter that he or she will go out on election day and cast a ballot in favor. If someone's not very enthusiastic about a new municipal complex, they might be motivated by a new animal shelter. It's a wise strategy, and Springdale is considering a worthy collection of projects.
But when the chief worrier is describing response times that make it sound like residents in some areas aren't even served by a municipal fire department, it should get everyone's attention. People sometimes forget just how much area the city of Springdale covers. It's clear the city, and its voters, need to take whatever steps are necessary to catch up.
Fire protection is among the most basic services people in a city expect, and they should.
Metal buildings or not, Springdale just needs to build these fire stations any way it can.
Commentary on 10/22/2017