PORT ANGELES — In an era of increasing calls and decreasing personnel, fire agencies often have to get creative.
That’s why the Port Angeles Fire Department (PAFD), Clallam County Fire District 2 (CCFD2) and Clallam County Fire District 3 (CCFD3) agreed one year ago to automatically respond to each other’s structure fires.
“Every department has limited resources and limited personnel,” PAFD Chief Derrell Sharp said. “Knowing that you have resources automatically en route provides an opportunity for people to kind of plan in advance of where they utilize those resources when they arrive.”
Prior to the automatic aid agreement, a fire agency would have to take the extra step to call for mutual aid from a neighboring fire district if the situation merited it. Now, firefighters know backup is already on the way.
“It’s getting the right resources moving in the right direction at the right time for the right emergency,” CCFD3 Chief Justin Grider said.
The terms of the agreement stipulate that, if there is a structure fire in one of the jurisdictions, the specified neighboring agency will automatically respond with a fire engine and at least two personnel. The third district will then dispatch an engine to one of the affected agency’s stations to help cover the area while the structure fire is being extinguished.
CCFD3 covers 142 square miles in Sequim and surrounding areas while PAFD covers Port Angeles and CCFD2 covers 85 square miles surrounding Port Angeles.
There have been countless times during the past year that this agreement has been helpful, chiefs said.
On July 22, a 5-acre brush fire blazed in Port Angeles on West 14th Street. When PAFD responded, CCFD2 was automatically dispatched to provide assistance. Non-automatic mutual aid from other agencies also was called in.
“We had a lot of resources on that incident and, without their assistance, that fire could have easily gotten out of control,” Sharp said.
Early in October, there were nearly back-to-back structure fires in Port Angeles and in CCFD2.
“On both those fires, we had fire engines coming from each agency automatically,” CCFD2 Chief Jake Patterson said. “It helped reduce the response time and how long it took people to get there.”
The automatic aid agreement is working so well that Patterson said the region is considering a countywide automatic aid agreement for “low-frequency, mass-casualty” incidents.
Automatic aid agreements help fire districts with a struggle that fire agencies across the country are facing: inadequate volunteer and career firefighter staffing levels.
In 2024, the United States’ population was 42 percent more than 40 years ago and had a 336 percent increase in emergency calls.
However, despite the higher workloads, fire departments were down 222,000 volunteers (about 25 percent) when compared with 1984, according to ABC News.
“We’re just kind of plugging a hole until we can get more career staff,” Patterson said. “Or get the volunteer response we need.”
Automatic aid agreements are pretty standard across the country, Grider said.
Fire District 1 (CCFD1) and Fire District 6 (CCFD6) have an informal automatic aid agreement for structure fires and other major emergencies, CCFD6 Commissioner Greg Waters said. But even without automatic aid agreements, all the fire districts try to remain available to provide mutual aid.
“It’s kind of like osmosis,” Clallam County Fire District 5 Commissioner Greg Bellamy said. “We all respond because we’re brother fire districts.”
In addition to automatic aid, another creative solution that CCFD2 and PAFD implemented is a rotating shared duty chief schedule. Sharp said duty chiefs take control of command, operations or safety, or all three, during an incident.
Patterson said that agreement also has worked out well.
“We have a duty chief on 24/7,” he said. “Which is something the fire district [CCFD2] never had.”
“It also just broadens the bench so, on the larger incidents, we might have two or three duty chiefs arrive,” Sharp said. “It’s definitely something we’re going to keep because it brings operational efficiency.”
Overall, Sharp said the county’s fire districts are working together more frequently. In addition to automatic aid agreements and shared duty chiefs, a lot of the districts train together, which helps to establish interagency relationships. Those relationships then help different crews work well together in the field, Grider said.
In the first few decades of Sharp’s work on the Peninsula, he said the different fire agencies often worked in silos.
“There was a lot of duplication of efforts and little communication between the agencies,” he said.
Between the last three to four years, however, he’s seen more collaboration.
“We don’t have the personnel, we don’t have the resources, to handle the larger incidents,” he said. “When we pool our resources, when we pool our personnel, we are that much more efficient and that much more equipped to handle those larger incidents.”
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Reporter Emma Maple can be reached by email at emma.maple@peninsuladailynews.com.
