Fire department maintains service standards with smaller staff Published March 3, 2010 By 375th Mission Support Group 375th Air Mobility Wing SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- In the past three years, the Scott Fire Emergency Services flight has responded to nearly 2,000 emergencies, all of which were met with skilled professional responders each resulting in successful mitigation. What's not been evident to the Scott community, however, is that during the same period the Fire Emergency Services career field saw a reduction in its personnel by 14 percent. This reduction in no way impacted response capabilities; Scott AFB firefighters are still the same top-notch trained, first class professionals the Scott community experienced prior to the reduction. As a result of these changes minor changes were made. First, the Air Force migrated fire emergency services from risk avoidance to risk acceptance. Following extensive analysis of response data it became evident that risk changes significantly on different days of the week, and times of the day. This data pinpointed when bases were most at risk for the need for emergency services. For example, data showed that during the duty day, when flying operations were at their peak, was a more likely time an emergency would occur, not on a weekend or holiday with no flying operations. Second, Scott Fire Services now "cross-staffs" our fire apparatus, meaning firefighters are assigned to both a conventional fire engine and an Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting vehicle, each of which previously were staffed separately. When an emergency is received, the crew will respond with the appropriate vehicle, and if a second response is received with no un-committed crew available, our mutual aid partners in St. Clair County will be relied on to assist. Non-emergency stand-by crews have also been curtailed. In previous years, thousands of hours were spent by firefighters watching maintenance activities in the event a fire were to start. The Air Force deemed this an unnecessary function, as fires almost never started in this manner, and maintained if the operation was so risky that a fire truck was required then the operation shouldn't be performed. Finally, firefighters used to respond to all medical emergencies. Today, Emergency Medical Services have migrated to a secondary responsibility of firefighters. An agreement has been created with the 375th Medical Group and its EMS provider Med-Star to respond to select life threatening emergencies. The men and women of the Scott Fire Emergency Services Flight are committed to providing the highest caliber emergency services possible. Since 2007, training and availability are unchanged; only emergency response is managed differently. The result, however, is always the same: unsurpassed professional firefighting services for Scott.