Residents calling for new fire station
Officials ‘formulating a plan’ as report highlights poor response times in Greenwich’s backcountry area
GREENWICH — A study of fire coverage throughout Greenwich has moved to the desks of the town’s new fire chief and assistant fire chief to decide the next steps even as the department looks to improve its response times.
The report, produced by Matrix Consulting Group, was accepted in December by the Board of Estimate and Taxation and was the subject of a public hearing last week as many backcountry residents called for a new fire station in northwest Greenwich.
“Right now, we’re digesting the study,” Assistant Fire Chief Brian Koczak said of the report, which he said arrived as the Greenwich Fire Department is beginning a strategic planning process. “We’re looking at the recommendations and formulating a plan.”
“Chief (Joseph) McHugh and I are both new upstairs,” he said. “We’re kind of learning on our own, and we’re in the middle of our whole budget process. When we get past that, we’re going to focus on the strategic plan.”
The GFD will meet with the BET Budget Committee on Feb. 16 on its spending plans, and the strategic planning meetings will
happen the first week of March.
The strategic plan, Koczak said, will be an internal look at the department as a whole, involving the career and volunteer firefighters, administration, union, the Board of Selectmen, the BET and the Representative Town Meeting. The goal is to look at strategic objectives for the next three to five years.
“This won’t be just another town study,” Koczak said. “It’s something that I initiated for our fire department. The Matrix report is part of it, but it’s not the whole focus.”
Looking at data
First Selectman Fred Camillo, whose duties include serving as fire commissioner, said there are several items in the report that “we can do right away.”
“But the fire chief and the assistant fire chief want more time to look at the data,” Camillo said. “I think it is prudent to do what we can now as far as the study goes and as far as what direction our new fire administration wants to go.”
Camillo said he would meet with McHugh and Koczak in the coming days and the schedule of how to proceed “would be up to them.”
“They have asked for that time and I’m going to give it to them,” Camillo said.
And while much of last week’s public hearing was on whether a new fire station is needed in northwest Greenwich, the fire department is working on improving overall response times.
The Matrix report found travel times averaged six minutes between 2015 and 2019, above the industry standard of four minutes for the urban areas of town. In rural areas, the average time was nine minutes and 14 seconds, under the 10minute benchmark.
But one problem with the response times is a technical issue, Koczak said, due to connection problems with the GFD’s mobile data terminals. When a firetruck responds to a call, he said, the crew pushes a button to tell dispatch they are en route. But failing connections are “skewing the data quite a bit,” he said.
“If the thing’s not making a connection, it makes our turnout time look terrible,” Koczak said. “A lot of turnout times we see in the study are not a true representation of what’s happening. It’s actually a shorter amount of time, and we want to make sure we have accurate data.”
Koczak said they are “on the right track” in working with their cell provider to provide a test solution that will be expanded to all stations soon, giving more accurate times.
BET response
BET chair Mike Mason called the ongoing discussions about fire coverage “a highly charged issue” given the push for increased coverage in the backcountry, particularly in northwest Greenwich.
In his view, Mason said the Matrix report makes it “pretty clear” that there are valid questions about fire response time throughout town.
Now that the public has voiced its views at the hearing, Mason said he is comfortable letting the fire department, Camillo and other emergency services set the pace.
“I think they’re expected, as they said, to dive in on this document and begin their take on it,” Mason said. “We have professionals that provide these services in this town, and the next step is for them to digest this document and start working on what they see as ways to make improvements.”
He added, “There’s no doubt the professionals in the town will have the next step on deciphering that report and deciding what steps they want to start now. It’s in their hands.”
Mason noted that this comes as the Greenwich Fire Department adjusts to new leadership. The top command staff in place when the study began have all since retired.
McHugh, a former battalion chief in the FDNY, was hired in August to succeed Fire Chief Peter Siecienski, who retired in May. And in October, Koczak, who has been with the GFD for more than 24 years, was made assistant fire chief. The department expects to hire another assistant fire chief, and Koczak said a reorganization is likely.
“We think this reorganization is really going to enhance public safety for everybody in town, not just a particular section,” Camillo said.
The future of Round Hill
While the Matrix study did not explicitly endorse building a new Northwest Greenwich fire station, as many residents in that area wanted, it did recommend adding resources to the existing Round Hill Volunteer Fire Company, an independent station on Round Hill Road.
Several speakers at the public hearing who advocated for improved Northwest Greenwich fire coverage spoke in favor of expanding the all-volunteer station at Round Hill to include career firefighters.
“We think this is good for the community, but where it goes from here is really up to the fire administration and the town administration,” said David Chass, vice president of the Round Hill Volunteer Fire Company.
The fire company is currently focused on $2 million in renovations at the station, which was built in 1957. The work is funded by $1 million from the town and $1 million in privately raised funds. At last week’s hearing, Chass stressed the need to go forward with the renovations and not wait for a decision on whether to assign career personnel there.
“It’s a wholesale renovation and modernization program,” Chass said. “The building hasn’t been renovated in decades. …
“We have health and safety code violations ... and we have life safety issues,” he said. “When the building was built, no one was worried about venting the trucks when they come back from calls. All the exhaust comes out in the bays. There’s no exhaust mitigation systems.”
According to Chass, if the town ultimately adds career personnel there, they could make accommodations.
He said the project has all the approvals it needs from the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission and they “are probably a couple of weeks away from submitting for a building permit.”