Boston Globe Series on Fire Fighter Staffing Issues

BOSTON GLOBE SERIES ON FIRE FIGHTER STAFFING ISSUES -- (Extensions of Remarks - February 08, 2005)

SPEECH OF
HON. EDWARD J. MARKEY
OF MASSACHUSETTS
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2005

· Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, today I am inserting in the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, excerpts from an excellent series on fire safety by Bill Dedman that ran in the Boston Globe on January 30 and 31, 2005. The series investigates the overwhelming problem of shrinking resources in local fire departments and the resulting threats to public and fire fighter safety. I urge my colleagues to read the entire series on line at: http://www.boston.com/news/specials/fires/.

· Mr. Dedman conducted what may be the most thorough analysis of the many threats to public safety resulting from understaffed fire houses, tight municipal budgets and ever growing responsibilities. Just this month my staff met with mayors of towns and communities in my congressional district in Massachusetts who are concerned that the fire fighter staffing problems are reaching crisis levels. Since September 2001, Massachusetts has lost 800 paid fire fighters by layoffs and attrition. We have too few fire fighters who are too thinly spread. And the work has essentially doubled.

· According to the National Fire Protection Administration, it is critical for fire fighters to arrive at a fire within 6 minutes. But that is not happening. The Globe series revealed that nationwide only 35 percent of fire departments were able to reach 90 percent of building fires in that time. Why? As the chiefs say, ``more work, fewer people.''

· I would like to share the following excerpts from the Globe with my colleagues:

..... Once a day on average in this country, someone dies when firefighters arrive too late, an investigation of fire response times by the Globe has found. America's fire departments are giving fires a longer headstart, arriving later each year, especially in the suburbs around Boston, Atlanta and other cities, where growth is brisk but fire staffing has been cut......

..... In Massachusetts, people waited 10 minutes or more for firefighters to arrive at 214 building fires in 2002, the last year for which data is available. Since 1990, there have been 2,786 such fires, including blazes at jails, mental hospitals, apartment buildings, shopping malls and private homes.

..... The fire department budgets are not growing to keep up, but shrinking. As a share of all municipal budgets across the country, fire spending has slipped, from 6.1 percent in fiscal 1987 to 5.7 percent in fiscal 2003, the Globe calculated from the US Census Bureau's survey of governments......

Small-town departments are increasingly undertaking aggressive interior assaults on fires. Some of these smaller fire departments do not have the training, equipment, and backup personnel to safely accomplish these dangerous tactics,'' warned a 1998 report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health ..... After the Worcester fire that killed six firefighters in 1999, federal investigators warned of the need to have a rested crew standing by with safety equipment. But fire chiefs in the Boston suburbs say such a team is usually assembled only after the fire is nearly out.

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