By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

When an emergency happens, seconds count. How quickly help arrives can be the difference between a limited amount of damage and a total loss, between saving a life and losing one. In Lee County, fire departments are often first on the scene of emergency calls because of their locations spread across the county, and the board of county commissioners received a report on July 15 recommending steps now to ensure communities can be certain their firefighters have everything they need.

Lee County’s population has grown by about 2,500 people since the last Census was taken in 2020, an increase of around 16 percent, and by the time the next decade rolls around in six years, around 72,500 are expected to call Sanford, Broadway, or the surrounding farms and fields home.

The county added several new industrial parks in 2023, and it seems it’s now closer than ever to reaping the rewards of all the growth that has taken place. It began to see the results of this growth almost six years ago in 2018 as the economy finally got back on the track after the Great Recession.

But along with that kind of rapid growth comes a demand for critical support services to support a thriving economy like Sanford’s and keep it growing. The commissioners were told that making some major investments in its system of fire services will have to take place over the next few years to keep all that growth from grinding to a halt very soon.

The commissioners were given an executive summary briefing of the results of a comprehensive fire services study for Lee County that had been recommended last fall by the Fire Advisory Board. The county then engaged the services of the North Carolina Fire Chief Consulting group to perform the study, a nine-month effort that included meetings with every fire department in the county, interviews with chiefs and firefighters, and an extensive review of performance data for the past several years.

The result was a 450-page exhaustive report that the commissioners saw for the first time on July 15, presented by retired Chief Greg Grayson. The review found Lee County has many good things going for it already with its fire services. It specifically mentions the quality of leadership in its fire departments, the high quality of working relationships between the departments, and the overall condition of the fire apparatus fleet and response equipment.

But there are also some major challenges facing the county’s system of fire response teams. The number of volunteers wishing to join with a local fire department is declining, resulting in additional financial need for personnel.

Firefighters across the county reported major issues with communications between their departments and the county’s 911 emergency response center, and with radio systems overall that include difficulties hearing inside of buildings. The report also pointed to an additional need for the number of firefighters to keep pace with the growth the county is experiencing.

Community risk analysis

The study by the N.C. Fire Chief Consulting group found a number of factors the commissioners, as well as each fire department, will need to consider as they plan for the next decade. The county has a lower level of poverty than the state average, and the number of children less than 5 years old and those 65 years and older who do not have health insurance is very close to the state average.

But there are also some significant challenges. The county has a significantly higher number of owner-occupied residences than the state average, meaning there are far fewer homes available for rent. And the county has six times the number of mobile homes than the state average.

The report attaches some projected numbers to the growth that is forecasted over the next five years. It notes that 2,761 new residential units have been approved by local governments and that 7,179 new people will move into them. Those numbers will likely mean that 336 more emergency calls will be received and responded to in each of the next five years.

How quickly emergency help can get to the scene is often the key factor in how incidents turn out, and the study reviewed more than 6,700 incidents over a five-year period. It found that almost 84 percent of all fire calls were within a five-minute travel time from a fire station and that more than 98 percent of all calls were responded to in less than ten minutes. It recommends that some adjustments can be made to the county’s fire districts to create quicker response times for fire and emergency response.

But the data also contains cause for concern in those response times because they are trending upward when reviewed for the last five years. The quickest responses come as no surprise. Sanford’s three stations all had response time averages of less than nine and a half minutes, with Station 3 averaging just over six minutes. Tramway, Northview, Deep River, and Cape Fear were each under eleven minutes, with Pocket, Lemon Springs, and Carolina Trace under twelve minutes.

What’s causing these increasing delays? Grayson believes the decline in the number of volunteers wanting to join fire departments and committing to years of service in their community is a large part of the problem. Increased traffic brought about by growth is another factor, and the increasing number of new residential developments have resulted in more work for those who are donating their services.

“A failure to communicate”

Complaints about the Sanford Police 911 Emergency Communications Center were heard by the Fire Chiefs Consulting group from fire departments and from members of the public who responded to online surveys.

Assistant Chief Greg Spivey of the Tramway Fire Department spoke to the commissioners at the meeting, bringing with him a folder he said contained negative reports about the Communications Center, most of them resulting from a failure to page firefighters correctly after an emergency call was received.

“We can have the best equipment and the best-trained firefighters, but all that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if we are not paged out correctly,” he said. The inability to receive a page when his department is called out to respond to an emergency “is a very big issue for us.”

The report makes eleven observations and recommendations about ways to improve communications between the Center and firefighters, both in receiving pages for emergency response and in the back and forth of conversations once crews are on the scene.

The evaluation looked at 48 large fire apparatus and 12 fire stations as part of its review. The overall state of fire equipment in the county received a rating of “good,” while the status of the stations themselves were considered to be only “fair,” mostly because of the inability to expand them to accommodate additional equipment as the region continues to grow, and also due to the lack of space to build dormitories that would allow stations to be manned continuously.

Of the 48 large fire apparatus that were looked at, 17 were more than 20 years old. An example of the types of issues found with the fleet can be seen in the records of a tanker truck that was purchased in 1989, 35 years ago. Its current issues include tires that are nearing the end of compliance with national standards, torn seats, a frayed ground ladder halyard line, an exhaust pipe coming out of the muffler, and a rusted exhaust hanger.

Your local fire department wants you!

Perhaps the most attention-grabbing section of the report is its review of volunteerism. Like almost every rural county in North Carolina, Lee County continues to rely heavily on volunteers to staff its community fire departments, as it has for more than a hundred years.

Across the Tar Heel state, the number of volunteers at fire departments has dropped by an average of 3.5 percent over the past five and a half years. Lee County has been doing better, with an average of 2.5 percent being lost during the same period, but still having lost 33 volunteers since its high of 218 across the county in 2018 and 2019, and showing an 8.4 percent loss of volunteers on a year-to-year basis from 2022 to 2023.

The report compiled by the N.C. Fire Chief Consulting group offers a number of recommendations for hanging on to current volunteers and successfully recruiting new ones. Among these is the creation of a centralized firefighter recruitment effort within county government that would include a retention and recruitment coordinator on at least a part-time basis, a position that could potentially be paid for through grant funding.

Another would be the creation of a high school fire program in Lee County, similar to one now in operation in Harnett County. Grayson said this model has been one of the most successful volunteerism models in the state, and he suggested a conversation with Lee County Schools to explore what opportunities might be available. Still another option that’s proven successful in other parts of the state is the development and funding of a volunteer incentive program tied directly to a member’s activity, rewarding regular volunteers for their participation.

Longer-term, the study recommends fire departments work closer with Lee County Government to agree on retention and recruitment goals, to widen the scope of volunteers to include support personnel, and to make good use of social media in recruiting and in developing good community relations. The county has a strong social media presence and has previously worked with other county and community groups to get the word out about the good work they do, and it’s this kind of expertise that the fire chief recommends tapping into.

Finally, the report lays out three immediate steps the commissioners could take this summer to start the process of updating and upgrading the county’s fire services capabilities. The first would be to establish a fire apparatus replacement funding plan and a facilities improvement plan that would begin the task of improving the equipment and infrastructure necessary for emergency response teams.

Second, the report recommends the establishment of a retention and recruitment coordinator to develop strategies to assist fire departments in recruiting new members and holding on to their current rosters. Lastly would be a decision on a funding model that would serve the county best for the long-term, along with making a commitment to revisiting and revising the county’s plans and strategies every six months.

What happens next

The July 15 meeting was the second session this summer where the commissioners have been presented with an important county public safety issue that needs immediate attention and will cost millions of dollars that are too much to write a check for today. They heard the result of a feasibility study for improving or replacing the current county jail on May 31, with estimates going as high as $86 million.

Lee County’s commissioners are holding meetings on a summer schedule for the next two months, with meetings now scheduled for August 19 and September 16, and regular bimonthly meetings set to resume on October 7. Six meetings are on the calendar before the elections take place on November 5.

The agendas for those meetings will determine, in many ways, what is ultimately done with this study that the county has paid more than $70,000 for. But the voices of almost 200 active volunteer firefighters, along with those who have retired after years of service, almost guarantee that this report is one that won’t get put on a shelf to gather dust.