A shame

Here is a headline that should make you more than a little nervous: “AFD staffing shortage leads to fears of disaster.”

The story, by KTUU, says Anchorage Fire Department’s staff of about 20 dispatchers are fielding crazy numbers of calls – with no increase in staff numbers. And when we say crazy, we mean crazy.

The “calls have increased from 68,677 per year in 2002 to 127,940 in 2018 — without any extra staff. And this year, they’ve already answered 70,000 calls in just about six months.

Driving the rise are drug-related calls, extreme weather, fire, and of course the November 30 earthquake,” KTUU reports.

The dispatchers at AFD do it all, talking high or mentally ill people down, calming victims, coaching people through child birth and CPR, not to mention trying to save domestic violence victims or children. While they do their incredibly difficult jobs, they are expected to assess the situation and get the right assets to the right place – and quickly. Imagine working through that. There is stress, plenty of stress, the kind of stress that causes burnout.

It is nothing short of ridiculous that as calls jumped from 68,677 in 2002 to 127,940 last year, with this year on track to break that number, the only constant is the number of dispatchers: about 20. It is more ridiculous because the department has asked for additional dispatchers and been rebuffed.

In a city that spends millions on the homeless, has money for parks, offers tax breaks for new construction downtown and spends millions for the old Legislative Information Office you might think there would be money to hire more of some of the most important first-responders in the city. Cops are nice to have, and so are firefighters. But without dispatchers, they are just people with guns and hoses and no place to go.

Government has few legitimate jobs. Public safety is near the top of its list of responsibilities. Having people who can direct public safety resources where they are desperately needed seems more than a trifle important to us. From where we sit the city has dropped the ball.

Someone on Anchorage’s Assembly should take the lead and do something to ease the dispatchers crunch before there is another major disaster and it costs lives.