By Claudia Vargas
The Philadelphia Inquirer
CAMDEN, N.J. — Five weeks after Camden laid off a third of its firefighters, the shock waves are reverberating outside city lines.
Camden’s fire department was cut to such bare bones that a structure fire on any given day requires all seven companies to respond, leaving none to attend to any other fire or rescue emergencies in the city.
Suburban fire companies — most staffed by volunteers — are filling the void in the densely populated, nine-square-mile city.
“We’ve seen a direct impact,” said Robert Mortka, president of the Camden County Fire Chiefs Association.
Between Jan. 18 and Feb. 15, fire companies throughout Camden County have been dispatched 84 times to aid the city, Mortka said. Close to half those calls were serious enough that three or four fire vehicles were sent to Camden.
Though mutual aid is nothing new, the increasing dependency on it in cash-strapped towns is becoming a national trend.
“We are seeing an increased reliance on mutual aid. It’s an ongoing topic of discussion in Massachusetts and across the country,” said Ken Willette, manager of the fire protection division of the Massachusetts-based National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
But, Willette said, it will take a few years of data to be able to say from a national perspective how the reliance on suburban mutual aid affects cities like Camden.
After 60 Camden firefighters were laid off Jan. 18, the city’s fire department required restructuring to continue functioning.
The city already had gone from 11 companies a few years ago to between seven and nine, depending on a brownout schedule under which certain companies would be closed each shift to save money. That arrangement lasted from May 2009 through the Jan. 18 layoffs.
After the layoffs, the department was reduced to seven companies each day but with a third less manpower than before.
The department went from seven engine trucks, three ladder trucks, one heavy rescue truck, a tour commander, and two deputy chiefs at all times to five engine trucks, two ladders, and one battalion chief per shift.
Delay in response time
While consequences include a larger response area for each company and the lack of instant backup, one of the most dangerous effects is a delay in response time, Camden Fire Chief Michael Harper said this month.
The NFPA recommends that career fire departments, such as Camden’s, be able to send an engine within six minutes 90 percent of the time. Any time later than six minutes, the risk of saving lives and salvaging any part of the structure is greatly increased.
“The fire grows exponentially as it generates more heat . . . it grows at a much more rapid pace,” Willette said.
Before the layoffs, most of Camden’s fire engine response times were within the six-minute mark. Since the layoffs, the times have ranged from three to eight minutes, according to a full list of calls from December and January.
When needed, mutual aid is first sought from “rim communities” that border Camden. Ideally, they would reach the scene of a fire within the recommended time. But if those departments are tied up with fires or emergencies in their own towns, the mutual aid call “keeps expanding out” into more distant suburbs, Harper said.
For example, on Feb. 12, all on-duty Camden firefighters were battling a vacant-building fire on Thompson Street, when a fire alarm went off at a day-care center on West Street. After several suburban departments did not respond, West Collingswood Heights came to the rescue 30 minutes later.
Luckily, there was no fire. Structure fires account for a very small percentage of fire calls. There were only 19 structure fires in January, according to city statistics. But Mortka said the response time to the West Street alarm was still of concern.
Another mutual-aid issue is the lack of guidance for firefighters from outside the city when they arrive at a Camden fire scene.
The layoffs left too few battalion chiefs for commanding more than one fire scene at a time. So suburbanites are left to figure it out on their own.
“We do the best we can with the training we’ve been given,” Mortka said. “What else can we do?”
Mutual aid can have drawbacks
Firefighters from areas outside Camden are unlikely to know the inherent dangers of certain buildings in Camden, said Robert Flemming, professor of management in the Rohrer College of Business at Rowan University and author of Effective Fire and Emergency Services Administration.
“When mutual aid becomes ‘We’re coming to cover the bread and butter calls,’ that’s a problem,” Flemming said.
Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd said her proposed budget, which was struck down by City Council on Feb. 8, called for a municipal property tax increase that would have brought back 11 firefighters and two battalion chiefs, as well as 47 police officers.
“The outcry, really, has been for police,” she said when explaining the difference in the hiring plan for the two departments.
A recent $5.1 million federal grant will help the city rehire some firefighters over the next two years, although an exact number has not been determined.
The mutual aid agreement between Camden and the suburbs is not a one-way deal. Camden is supposed to help the suburbs when they have big fires or complicated situations that call for the Regional Urban Search Team, made up of the Camden and Cherry Hill Fire Departments. The team responds to confined space rescues, hazardous materials, and trench rescues, Harper said.
Camden’s responsibility to that team is now “based on availability,” Harper said.
On Friday, Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers and Camden’s Harper held a joint news conference to explain Philadelphia and New Jersey’s mutual-aid agreement for catastrophic events, in which the fire departments would cross the Delaware River to help the other side if all other resources had been depleted.
That agreement, in place since 2008, also is designed to work both ways.
Collingswood Fire Chief John Amet said that since the layoffs, his department had been called to help in Camden a handful of times.
The summer will be the real test of how mutual aid in post-layoff Camden works out because the number of fires tends to increase in the hot months, he said.
“The city quiets down in the winter time,” Amet said. “If you call me in July, I’ll have an earful for you.”
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