On Thanksgiving Day, a New Bedford firefighter, lying prone at the tip of an extended ladder high in the air, worked on a high-pressure hose that was aimed at an out-of-control three-structure fire on Washburn Street in New Bedford.

It was a chaotic, smoky scene that day in Hicks-Logan, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, and the lone firefighter working that hose high in the air, with no safety bucket affixed, took my breath away.

At the Thanksgiving Day fire on Washburn Street in New Bedford, a firefighter worked with the hose at the tip of a ladder in the upper left-hand corner of this photo. [ Jack Spillane ]

That’s the kind of stamina and bravery a firefighter can be called upon to display. It is why we pay firefighters more than many other city workers. It is why they can retire young. It is why firefighters are held in a special kind of reverence by the public.

But as bad as the Hick-Logan fire was -- which folks at the scene said was caused by a Thanksgiving turkey being carelessly deep fried -- the fact is that it was an outlier.

The truth is that there are simply not as many fires in New Bedford or any other American city anymore. The National Fire Protection Association says the number of fires in 2018 was roughly a third of what it was in 1997. The NFPA says the decline is due to stricter fire codes, more fireproof building materials, and more widespread use of smoke detectors and sprinkler systems.

An older, dense urban housing stock like much of New Bedford’s is somewhat of an exception to this fact, however, as old-fashioned balloon-frame, hollow construction is a tinder box.

Mayor Jon Mitchell referred to the overall decline in the number of fires in his annual budgetary address to the City Council last summer, noting that fires have dropped by more than half over the last 40 years.

So what has replaced fires to occupy the time of fire departments?

Medical calls, and not all of them serious emergencies.

Up until this year, medical calls made up an astounding 70% of all the calls that New Bedford firefighters responded to. But that all changed in 2020 after Mitchell ordered the city’s fire and EMS dispatchers to change their practices so that only EMTs go out on most medical calls.  Firefighters only join in on the serious ones. Gone are the days when an entire engine headed down the street to respond to someone who had fallen and couldn’t get up.

This benefits the Fire Department in a couple ways. An engine is not going to get caught at a disadvantageous location if a fire call comes in. Fewer responses to non-emergency calls also saves the wear and tear on engines.

The New Bedford fire and EMS services now project that the city department will answer some 3,000 fewer calls this year as a result of the new system.

The Thanksgiving Day fire in New Bedford took out three structures on densely developed Washburn Street in New Bedford’s Ward 3. [ Jack Spillane ]

You might say, why not train all the firefighters to do EMS calls like the adjacent towns of Fairhaven and Acushnet do? And the reason is that firefighters, appropriately, are a lot more expensive than EMTs. Contractually, the city is required to pay the health care costs for the firefighters who, because of the understandable stress and danger of their jobs, can retire 15 or so years before many other municipal workers.

So New Bedford, like the three neighboring fire districts in suburban Dartmouth (where the departments are partially reliant on call firefighters) saves money by keeping the fire and EMS departments separate. There is an argument for combining fire and EMS (as is done in Acushnet and Fairhaven); it brings in insurance money but there is no doubt that firefighters are still more expensive than EMTs.

The police and fire department operating budgets comprise a full half of the city’s discretionary budget -- the school department is overwhelmingly paid for by the state and the other big ticket items -- health care and retirement costs -- are contractually obligated. So savings in the public safety departments are the most meaningful in a blue-collar city where many homeowners struggle mightily to pay their property taxes. 

Station 3 in the near North End of New Bedford. The Mitchell administration plans to reduce a fire company at this station, replacing Engine 8 with a combination engine and ladder truck called the quint. [ Jack Spillane ]

With firefighters responding to far fewer medical calls, Mitchell last summer, for the second time in three years, called for the elimination of a four-person, 24/7 engine company (Engine 8). It will save about $2.7 million a year.

City councilors, who are sensitive to losses of service, or perceived losses, have been all over the proposal to decommission the Engine 8 fire company as has the firefighters’ union. That’s understandable on the part of the union, they’re a union. Their commitment is to protect their fellow workers. (Although in this case no one is to be laid off, the savings will occur through attrition.)

The firefighters are also understandably concerned about both the public’s and their own safety because of the mayor’s plans to replace Engine 8 with a so-called “quint,” a truck that can function as both a ladder and an engine but which firefighters say is not designed for a dense urban environment. Mitchell says it will meet national safety standards for almost all of the city.

The city is not united on the issue.

Former Mayor Scott Lang feels deeply that cities should not cut their public safety effort. A long-time union lawyer, Lang points out that you can fund some of a fire department on ongoing federal grants and the city has the capability to grow its tax base so that it can keep all nine of its remaining fire companies.

“Everything starts with public safety” he says and a difference of 30 seconds is the difference between life and death in a rapidly growing fire.

The city councilors are overwhelmingly of the same mindset as Lang as but none of them except Linda Morad has been specific about where the $2.7 million is going to come from to fund the department. It has already been eliminated from this year’s budget. 

Morad, a council veteran of almost two decades, politely called out her fellow councilors on it last week.

“I am opposed to closing Engine 8 but right now I can’t support that because I have no way to pay for it. And neither do any of you,” she said. 

The council, without much comment, quickly agreed to Morad’s proposal in favor of the city keeping Engine 8 the rest of the fiscal year pending New Bedford winning a federal SAFER grant to operate it for another three years.

An American flag is attached to the rear cab of Ladder 1 outside of Station 1 in downtown New Bedford. [ Jack Spillane ]

The Mitchell administration has applied for the SAFER grant but the mayor is not budging on eliminating the Engine 8 company. He’s already purchased the “quint” to replace it. He says the SAFER grant, if it comes through, will be used to “maintain service levels” until a new North End fire station that combines two stations can be built in three or four years. 

The union continues to disagree.

“It will take a little bit longer to get that quint to the scene because you figure it’s slower,” Local 841 President Billy Sylvia recently told Channel 12 out of Providence. “Also when you get there, you’re gonna have less manpower, less boots on the ground.”

Mitchell is undeterred. He looks at the city’s resources and abilities and says Engine 8, which is scheduled to go offline at the end of the month, is not coming back.

In fact, the decision has been a done deal since last summer, decided upon when this fiscal year’s budget was adopted in the wake of the decline of city and state revenue caused by the pandemic. Short-term, there is a $69 million one-time payment of federal funds coming to New Bedford now that the stimulus has been passed, but there are more than a few claims on that money.

The mayor says he is looking for what the city needs long-term for a fire department and it does not need nine companies. The plan is to downsize.  

Mitchell argues that fire circumstances have changed and New Bedford simply does not need the large fire department it once had, that a department with two fewer fire companies can reach all but a couple of streets on the far end of the peninsula and a rural area north of the airport within national fire safety standards. In Mitchell’s annual budget address last August he pointed out that even after the elimination of the engine company, the city will have the same number of fire companies as similarly-sized Brockton and one fewer than similarly-sized Fall River.

“In the long run, we  think there should be consolidation,” he said.