The Fire Department has a staff of 224 firefighters and an average response time of between three and four minutes. Last year, the department received about 5,000 calls. Evans said this year is on pace to be higher. He said the department has been able to maintain its staff only through temporary fixes.

The department received a two-year, $22 million Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response, or SAFER, grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The grant, which expires in September 2017, is a large supplement to the $18 million the city contributes.

Without that grant, the Fire Department may have to cut 84 firefighters unless other funding makes up the difference. Evans said he’s confident they’ll get the grant again.

Meanwhile, calls continue on a daily basis. On Sept. 12, firefighters responded to back-to-back fires at an apartment complex and in two Dumpsters. Just this week, two reports of hazardous materials had firefighters wearing protective hazmat suits scrambling.

“We’ve had more than usual,” Evans said. “Structure fires, Dumpster fires. … It was a busy summer.”

By national standards, the Pekin Fire Department is overworked and understaffed. It struggles to keep its firefighters trained and fit.

Yet it received high marks in an independent efficiency study commissioned by the City Council.

The department’s challenges “will only increase” in coming years, Chief Kurt Nelson said as he reviewed the study conducted this summer by GovHR USA, which devoted special focus on the functions of the city’s second-largest department.

For that, blame the “Baby Boomers.”

The city’s population born between 1946-64 is getting older and sicker. Much of it is near or below poverty levels. Firefighters are the first to respond to those peoples’ emergency needs, providing basic medical care and preparing them for ambulance transport by Advanced Medical Transport, a private company, when necessary.

The department answers about 14 such calls a day, GovHR USA noted. Last year it conducted 5,226 emergency medical responses — 18 percent more than in 2013.

Those calls comprise about 75 percent of the department’s workload, funded by an annual operating budget of $6.6 million, Nelson said.

“The burden falls on us,” he said, as first responders to medical calls for people who, for reasons mixed into the changing health care landscape that include state agency funding cutbacks, are home rather than in a hospital or long-term care facility “where they often should be.”

The department answers that growing demand with a 52-man staff broken down into 13-man shifts of 24 hours on duty, 48 hours off.