By Betsy Finklea
Fire departments were discussed during the administrator’s report at a recent Dillon County Council meeting.
County Administrator Rodney Berry said that he had spent a tremendous amount of time on the fire departments. He said these guys are tremendous workers, and we owe them a debt of gratitude. He said on any given day they could go in and not come back.
Berry said they are recognizing some places that they could tighten up a little bit in the way of resources financially and manpower.
Berry said they had implemented some things that were not totally embraced to begin with but as the week had gone on he thought they were starting to embrace it.
Berry said one of the things they had implemented was a two-call structure response. He said no alarms there because if anybody has any trouble, they can pick up the horn and tell the next appropriate station to come out.
Another measure is approved vacation in advance.
He said they had gotten away from maintaining daily logs and that is important for a number of reasons. He said they put that back in practice.
Another thing is no additional pay if you are on the clock. If one is on the clock, he will not receive additional pay to respond to a fire.
Berry said after the dust settled, he felt like everyone was in agreement with that.
Councilman T.F. “Buzzy” Finklea, Jr., said he thought they needed to look at the station fire response a little further. He said they needed to look at what OSHA requires, and he thought they might have to change it back to a three station response. Finklea said he had seen a letter where when they went to three-station response on fires that the ISO rating automatically went down at one point in his area. He said if it goes to a two-station response then the ISO rating may go back up which would be a cost to taxpayers in his area on homeowners insurance. He asked Berry to look into it. Berry said her would absolutely double-check into that. He said his understanding was that it would not affect it, but he would double-check it.

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Editor’s Note: To view this meeting, visit The Dillon Herald’s channel on YouTube (searchable under Johnnie Daniels/look for The Dillon Herald sign); go to www.thedillonherald.com; or go to the direct link at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_cZzFllVsK. It is the Dillon County Council Feb. 22, 2017 meeting.