The union representing career firefighters in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is raising alarms about a staffing shortage that’s persisted for years, even as call volumes have gone up.
It’s to the point the union even commissioned its own study, which argued there aren’t enough firefighters — or even firehouses — to meet the needs of the growing county.
“Prince George’s County doesn’t have enough firefighters, not just in their vacancy rate, but as an overall strength,” said Grant Walker, the president of IAFF 1619.
“Our data is showing that on average … it takes nine minutes and 28 seconds to get a first on scene, fire truck or ambulance for your call,” he said. “That’s over double the national standard.
He said that doesn’t mean first responders will arrive within 10 minutes.
“We’ve got plenty of data that shows some calls are taking far longer for units to get to calls, and when you’re talking about someone in cardiac arrest, respiratory arrests, a drowning, a fire, those seconds matter,” Walker said.
For Walker, it all comes back to staffing.
“Because there is not enough firefighters in the system, you cannot staff additional units to address the response time standard,” he said.
And it’s not just more firefighters that are needed, he said more firehouses are also needed, especially in the National Harbor area, as well as other parts of the county. But he said the reality of the situation is that it just isn’t possible right now.
“The majority of your response times problems go away with personnel,” he said.
Fire Chief Tiffany Green agreed with Walker on the need to hire more staff.
Last year, the county allocated money to hire 150 new firefighters, the biggest number of new hires ever. At a budget hearing earlier this month, Green said the next recruit class beginning in June will help meet that goal.
“It’s been an aggressive hiring campaign,” Green said. “And that’s not without its challenges.”
Included in those challenges are salary and benefits, which Green said rank among the lowest in the region even after increasing pay last year. But she said the department had a plan to eventually fill all the vacancies that exist, though it could take the rest of the decade to meet that goal.
Walker said that’s because the hiring process is broken and needs to be improved. He was also critical about the amount of mandatory overtime firefighters have been required to work.
In that budget hearing, Green admitted that’s made retaining veteran firefighters a challenge, but she also said the amount of mandatory overtime being required has dropped a lot over the last year.
But while leadership and the union agree that more firefighters and paramedics are needed, they don’t agree that it’s hindering response time.
The department said response times in Prince George’s County are on par with the rest of the D.C. region, and that the standard being cited by the union isn’t achievable without a massive boost in the number of firehouses because of how big and how congested the area is.
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