By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
Last night at the Northfield City Council meeting, Fire Chief Tom Nelson gave the 2023 Northfield Area Fire and Rescue Services report. NAFRS responds to fire and rescue calls in Northfield, Dundas, and the Rural Fire District, which makes up several townships around the area. The presentation detailed the operations of the department from the past year. Overall the department responded to 589 calls in 2023 which includes both fire and rescue calls, down from 721 calls in 2022. The largest portion of calls was emergency medical calls and false alarms, both of which also saw the largest drop from 2022 to 2023. With the addition of a full-time Fire Chief role last year, Nelson was able to follow up and work with individuals and commercial businesses to reduce false alarm calls by enforcing fire code and recommending design changes. NAFRS Firefighters are volunteers and are only paid for each call they respond to. Since the overall number of false alarms was reduced, the department ultimately saved money.
Of those calls 306 or about 80% were in Northfield, 16% were in the rural fire district, and 2.9% were in Dundas. The average response time from receiving the 911 call to arriving on the scene was 7.2 minutes in Northfield and about 4 minutes longer for Dundas and the rural district, which are both farther away from the fire hall.
Both Full-time and volunteer departments, of which NAFRS is the later, have struggled to be fully staffed. However, NAFRS has retained its staff well, with about nine years being the average number of years of service on the department. This past year there were many applicants for new positions as well; here’s Fire Chief Tom Nelson on the KYMN Morning Show in August.
“But the analogy I use is hearing from the Lakeville Fire Chief two years ago at a meeting, he said, well, we’re hiring paid on call volunteer firefighters this year again. And so they ended up going with a combination department because they couldn’t get people that wanted to be on the fire department. We have a great problem this time around, is we had almost 25 people that applied for the fire department and we were able to get that down. We wanted to hire 8 and we hired 8 really solid a diverse group of new hires. Everyone’s really excited”
(Fire Chief Tom Nelson)
You can watch the whole presentation by clicking on this link and then clicking on the video for the September 3rd City Council Meeting.
