Should fire response policy be changed?
When a fire was reported at McMinnville Molding on Saturday, the first people on the scene were volunteer firemen with the Campaign-Rock Island Fire Department.
Firefighters with McMinnville Fire Department didn’t arrive for another 15 minutes.
The reason? McMinnville Molding is located just outside the city limits. That means it’s the responsibility of one of the county’s volunteer fire departments to respond to the blaze, in this case Rock Island.
Other fire departments, such as McMinnville, are only supposed to provide backup through a mutual aid agreement. And that mutual aid must be requested by the incident commander, who is usually the fire department chief.
‘If we hadn’t waited so long to provide mutual aid, the damage would have been minimal,’ said Alderman Billy Wood. ‘Volunteer fire departments do an outstanding job, but they are greatly handicapped by the fact they are not usually at the fire department when the call comes in. There is no way they can get there as quickly as a fully manned fire department.’
Response time is critical because a fire roughly doubles in size every two minutes. Rock Island firemen arrived on the scene 14 minutes after the call was dispatched, according to 911 records.
McMinnville Molding suffered extreme damage from the fire that either burned or smoldered from Saturday till Tuesday. No one was injured but the business could be in store for a long-term shutdown.
McMinnville Molding had 55 employees, according to owner Ricky Northcutt.
‘What happened Saturday was a huge financial loss and job loss,’ said Alderman Bobby Kirby. ‘When you see a building up in flames, I don’t think we need to sit back and wonder if they paid city taxes. I don’t have a problem with using city equipment or city personnel. I’d like to look at it and see if there’s a better way to handle the situation.’
The fire raises a major question about city services. McMinnville officials have tried in recent years to annex additional property and extend city services to more residents, but those annexation efforts have largely been met with resistance.
McMinnville Molding is not in one of the areas which has been targeted for recent annexation.
‘When we start pulling outside the city, we’re taking away from taxpayers inside the city,’ said Mayor Royce Davenport. ‘If we start doing this, we have a $650,000 fire engine that every volunteer fire department will ask for every time they have a structure fire.’
McMinnville Fire Department is willing to provide assistance once mutual aid is requested by the incident commander, but current policy forbids the department from directly responding to a fire outside the city limits. Lawrence said it would take significant legal work to change such a policy.
Lawrence said there has been some preliminary discussion among city officials about modifying the current policy to cover fires within a half mile of the city limits. But he indicated that was just early talk.