10-Year CIP "Field Trip" Nets more Problems than Answers (Part 1 of 2)

As a member of the 10 year Capital Improvement Plan committee comprised of residents and business owners, the morning of Winter’s Yuletide Gathering was more than festive activities and shopping downtown, it was a 2 hour tour of the City of Tipp City in a passenger bus together. (OK, maybe it was NOT as festive as it could have been)

Emergency Medical Services

The tour of the city included 37 locations that the City Manager wanted us to take a look at. First on the agenda was a look at the Fire and EMS station located on Main Street (at Hyatt). Chief Senseman walked us through the two bay garage that held three EMS vehicles. Yes, you heard that right. The EMS drivers have figured out how to park three emergency vehicles in a garage made for just two. The garage doors and sides of the “life buses” show where the vehicles scraped up against each other. We were given a tour of the inside of EMS #1, the primary vehicle that responds to emergencies within the city. We found out that the $25,000 defibrillator that jump starts heart attack and trauma victims is turned on during 75% of all EMS runs. Scary, really.

Chief Senseman explained the plight of the EMS. Here are just as few highlights..

1. Each rolling gurney in the EMS vehicles need to be inspected each year for $5,000 (by state law/regulation). A good expense if you don’t want your loved one to take a header on the ground while being transported in a failed gurney.
2. Any future public and private facilities housing the EMS workers must be ADA accessible and certified (again by state/federal law). While there are no handicapped Tipp City EMS workers, the bathrooms, shared areas, kitchens, etc. all need to have the accommodations, ramps, handles and elevators installed which greatly increases the expense involved.
3. The current EMS quarters do not include private or public sleeping areas. While on constant call, the co-ed workers who put in either 12 hour or 24 hour shifts, find rest on the floor or in what appeared to be a couple 25 year old couches (donated by some resident back in the day). The general quarters for the EMS workers was frankly embarrassing in comparison those quarters afforded to other departments (Streets for example).
4. There are no showers in the facility, with the exception of an open hazmat cold water shower stall.
5. From a facility and budget consideration, the Tipp City EMS runs with 4 workers at the station at most times. Cardiac and severe trauma runs require 3 workers per van. Leaving one worker at the station. The second EMS van cannot be ran out if a second emergency happens as a minimum of two workers are required to operate. The call must go to Troy EMS to respond. Making the second van ineffective if you can’t even run it out but for shift change.
6. There have been 44 calls to Troy EMS to respond in the past year. I shared my personal story with the Chief where a friend’s toddler fell down a flight of stairs and was bleeding all over with a head laceration, the 911 call was responded to in 3-4 minutes by the Tipp City Police, and 22 minutes by the Troy EMS. That evening the Tipp EMS workers were responding to a cardiac event elsewhere in town.

Fire Department

After the entirely discouraging discussion with Chief Senseman the CIP committee met with Fire Chief Kessler. We learned that some of the vehicles responsible for running out to put out fires across town were older than some of us on the committee. Half of the vehicles in the fire bay belonged to Monroe Township who could (if they ever decided to) take them at any time. Tipp City operates and maintains all of the vehicles in the same location as the EMS. The key area of interest was the aging ladder truck with it’s original tires and entirely out of date equipment. Regulations like enclosed passenger areas (yes, it’s against the law to hang on the back of a fire truck as it screams through town) and computerized ladder controls (to keep the truck from tipping over) were just a couple of the glaring problems with our aging ladder truck.

Some jaw dropping factoids that I collected from Chief Kessler’s talk with us:

1. It takes only 8 minutes for most new suburban homes to burn down. The cheap wood used to construct modern homes is infused with plastic which acts as an accelerant. Brick and wood homes in the Downtown district take forever to burn down, allowing the fire teams to put it out before much damage to the structure occurs. New homes however burn down so quickly, if the firemen are not putting water on it within 5-6 minutes of the call you may need to kiss that new home goodbye.
2. Ladder-truck runs are necessary to the large new homes(McMansions) to get to the fire in the first place. They poke holes in the roof and pour water into it to put out the fire.
3. Our current ladder truck does not have a pump on it, so it has to roll out with a pumper truck every time. (requiring two teams of workers)
4. Our current ladder truck would NOT pass an inspection, so he has not scheduled one to occur. 🙁
5. Our shared agreements with Troy for Fire have an average of 22 minute response times. If you are in a new home that is on fire, and we are relying on the Troy Fire team to respond, its probably already a full loss.
6. The big unknown is this thing called the fire ISO rating. Each year we are rated on our ability to fetch and put out fires and areas like aging equipment are taken into account. If our rating goes down, all residents may see an increase in their home owners insurance rates (your mortgage) and operating a business could become significantly more expensive.

I welcome other members of the 10 year CIP to weigh in on this article as well as residents and business owners. Is this information that you did not have before about the condition of our EMS and Fire teams?

In my second report, I’ll share what our team found when visiting the cracked and pot-holed streets of Tipp City.