By Richard Marinucci

However you view service delivery in your community, the outcomes of the emergencies are products of staffing, response time, and competence (well trained and educated across the spectrum). This applies to fires, medical emergencies, extrications, technical rescues, and anything else that requires a response. Some of the calls will have the same result regardless of these matters. Consider a dumpster fire. Send one or 20 people, be really efficient and effective, and get there quickly—it doesn’t matter. A bunch of trash burned up. There was no value to start with so there wasn’t anything to save. Of course, one could argue that a quicker extinguishment reduces pollution and irritating odors faster. But, you should get the picture. It is not all calls that matter, just the challenging ones.

Related to this is a discussion I recently had about mutual aid. It seems that in many places it has gotten away from mutual and become “mooch-ual!” Some departments are not able to carry their weight and properly reciprocate. It is the result of run volume outpacing finances. In many of these cases, the departments that are “mooching” are put in that position by the politicians, bean counters, and policy makers. They claim they don’t have the funding and overly rely on their neighbors. It puts both fire departments in somewhat of a predicament.

Look at it another way. Assume you have a neighbor who has every imaginable tool. You need one of them occasionally. No point buying one. You can just borrow it. Then you need a different tool. You borrow that. The neighbor wants to be a good neighbor, and it generally doesn’t matter if the tool is gone for a couple of days. But, when does it become unreasonable? You may not be able to reciprocate with tools, but you might have other things of value. You might say thank you with a bottle of booze or a dinner. But if it evolves into a situation where it is taken for granted, you may ultimately lose your tool crib. In some communities, this may be happening with mutual aid.

The organizations making the requests most likely would prefer that they are staffed appropriately to handle the day to day events. Mutual aid was really intended for infrequent incidents that most departments aren’t staffed to handle. It certainly makes sense to do this as it benefits all involved when it is really mutual. But when it doesn’t, the department being requested beyond reasonableness gets political pressures that it didn’t ask for. It feels compelled to respond either because of a written agreement or the sense of duty or both. Some may even take the posture that medical responses where reimbursement is received helps to better utilize units and generate additional income. But in the end, any system that is not mutual and is being abused will create problems for both sender and receiver.

Getting out of this predicament is not easy. It always helps to know the players and relationships among communities. It is also helpful to have a very good understanding of mutual aid and any written agreements and obligations. I personally don’t believe that mutual aid is the answer to a community response problem. If it gets to a point where it can no longer be mutual there needs to be serious discussions of establishing a bigger fire authority or merging organizations. Without this, hard feelings will develop as firefighters begin to regret the added responsibilities (which they didn’t sign up for), and chiefs will need to be prepared to explain why they could not cover their own community emergency because they were in another that chose to downgrade its service levels. There needs to be a proactive approach bef