Ambulance deployment and Engine crew reductions remain unresolved
Smoky Dyer announced his retirement from the department yesterday, after a dozen years as the fire chief.
The last few years have been dominated by two issues.
Fire company staffing reduction
In April the chief refused to reduce engine company staffing from four to three person crews to meet a $7.6 million shortfall in the municipal budget. Is Fire Chief Dyer retiring? My guess: Yes
A recently awarded $4.5 million SAFER grant will reduce this impact, going from 105 to 30 layoffs.
Some on the city council are looking for a different approach:
“I think it’s an opportune time because we need to look at a new model that de-emphasizes fire suppression and puts more emphasis on first response and ambulances,” said Councilman Ed Ford.
Lynn Horsley (2012 July 18) Smokey Dyer says it’s right time to leave as KC fire chief. Kansas City Star
Controversy over ambulance response times
MAST was a high performance ems system that used system status management to park ambulances throughout the community. At the start of the merger Chief Dyer stated that the fire department does not intend to maintain an ambulance response time of 8:59 minutes to priority one calls 90% of the time. 
Dyer points out that their implementation of fire company delivered compression-only resuscitation has almost doubled the number of patients showing a return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC).
2009 November 22: The neon red elephant of EMS (Fire takeover of MAST)
2011 May 02: Kansas City fails to meet ambulance response times
Mike "FossilMedic" Ward
Also on FireGeezer…
- “Radio Silence” an unfortunate example of fire mangled deployment – October 25, 2012
- Is The Kansas City Council Readying For a Fire Department Upheaval? – March 1, 2012
- KayCee City Manager Wants To Lay Off Firefighters, Use Savings To Give Other City Employees Raises – February 8, 2012
- LAFD gets $1.6M to staff 11 ambulances with overtime crews until June – May 7, 2013
