Coming off its busiest year ever with 1,015 calls in 2023, Philomath Fire and Rescue continued to see an upward trend through the first few days of 2024.
Take this past Thursday. Emergency medical personnel left the station at 4:15 p.m. for a cardiac arrest just over a mile southwest of town down a rural road off Alsea Highway. Another call followed in response to someone experiencing diabetic-related problems roughly 2 miles to the east in the middle of town. A third dispatch occurred soon after to send a crew out to the scene of a crash about 6 miles away southwest of town on Airport Avenue.
Philomath Fire and Rescue’s Rich Saalsaa, whose job titles include deputy fire chief, emergency medical technician, training site coordinator and public information officer with the local department and an Oregon State Fire Marshal’s incident management team, said the late-afternoon responses serve as a prime example of the challenges seen on a given day in the district.
“We had three calls within 30 minutes’ time and we were literally going from one call to the next call to the next call — bang, bang, bang — they never got back to the station,” Saalsaa said.
Philomath Fire and Rescue reached a significant milestone in 2023 with calls surpassing 1,000 for the first time ever. Call volume increased for the fifth straight year and was 4.1% higher than 2022.
If you go back over the past decade, the most recent numbers represent an 84.2% increase. Of the 1,015 dispatches last year, 80% involved medical calls. An aging population appears to be a factor that factors into the numbers.
“A lot of people are retiring here and the vast majority of our calls are basically sick people and public assistance calls — lift assists,” Saalsaa said. “In fact, the very first two calls this year were both lift assists and we’re going to continue to see that.”
Saalsaa said that although there has been somewhat of an increase to the city’s population density through the addition of apartments, the district hasn’t experienced parallel numbers in terms of the number of calls.
And as far as crashes, the numbers on Highway 20 have remained consistent with no significant increase in major incidents.
“I think we saw a bit of an uptick on Highway 20 when the road got straightened out,” Saalsaa said. “Fortunately, it hasn’t been big rig stuff, which is what I would have anticipated because there was way more commercial traffic on that road when it was straightened out from what it was before.”
In 2022, the Oregon Department of Transportation removed the long-established safety corridor designation from the stretch of Highway 20 in Lincoln County. Safety corridors are created to target problem areas for crashes.
Average response times were better in 2023 to continue an important trend. Saalsaa said that in the last five years, times have improved from 1.9 minutes to 1.35 minutes. The response time is from the time of dispatch to when responders are out of the door.
“That’s fallen significantly over the last 10 years,” Saalsaa said. “A lot of it has to do with people here 24 hours a day — it used to be all volunteers so that response time would go way up because you have to wait for people to get here, get everybody assembled, get in the rigs and then go.”
Another factor involves information received from dispatch.
“Now, dispatch has something called a pre-alert on medical calls,” Saalsaa said. “So we actually get word that something’s happening … we’ll get over to our unit and get ready to go.”
The average arrival time continues to be under five minutes.
Philomath Fire and Rescue is currently at full staff for its career personnel with seven individuals. A paid lieutenant and firefighter engineer staff the station for one shift but there are plans to equal those same staffing levels on the other shifts.
“Obviously it takes money,” Saalsaa said. “We are seeing an incremental increase in revenue because of the growth — it’s not exponential growth by any stretch of the imagination but it does help,” Saalsaa said. “
Voters approved a 10-year bond in 2016 and when it expires, the district could be headed in the direction of an option levy to supplement property tax revenue.
The plan is to have an option levy to replace the bond, which then would give us the opportunity of being able to afford hiring more people into full-time positions,” Saalsaa said.
The volunteer numbers remain low at 23. Participation is an issue for most volunteer-supported organizations.
“It’s us and everybody else essentially, “Saalsaa said. “We’re kind of competing for the same people it seems like and this one’s (volunteer position) obviously very specific when it comes to fire training and EMS training and things of that nature. But we have an interview today with a prospective resident volunteer, for example, so we still get interest.”
The district carries six resident volunteers.
The staff and volunteers stay busy even when call volume slows down. The district manages public education and fire and safety initiatives, including a 10-week emergency medical responder course with a dozen students. Last year, there were also 112 business inspections along with water supply evaluations for 120 residences and 51 businesses.
