2012-12-12 Fire Commission Regular Minutes

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HawaiÒi County Fire Commission Regular Session Minutes December 12, 2012 Page 3 Hpuna Water Safety Tower: This is the life guard tower stand that they purchased to be placed on the north end of Hpuna Beach on the countyÓs jurisdiction. They are still waiting for DLNRÓs approval to put property. The State provides the grant to provide the water safety officers. Kawailani Station: In response to Vice Chair RobinsonÓs inquiry about the alterations to the garage to fit the new apparatus, Chief Rosario stated that Public Works is looking at two cost effective options. One would be to rebuild the back garage and the other would be to raise the roof. In the long term, they have a CIP request for a replacement fire station for Kawailani road is expanded and widened. Councilman Onishi is working on securing property off of Haihai Street. A fire station takes upwards of three years to be built. HUMAN RESOURCES DIVISION Hiring and Promotions: Internal recruitments continue. They hired three fire radio dispatchers and three resigned. Two fire fighter recruits will be taking the physical agility test on December 21. They were unable to take the test due to two protected classes, pregnancy and military deployment. If they pass the test, they will go through the same process that the other recruits went through. Ocean Safety has two vacant positions. Four retirements are scheduled for this month and will be replaced with transfers. EMERGENCY OPERATIONS DIVISION Operations: They are working on an Incident Management Team. It is a select group of dedicated individuals, not necessarily fire personnel, with special training and expertise to mitigate long-term incidents. This is being done statewide. They have an incident command trailer that is used as a command post. two, one for East and West HawaiÒi. Currently, the trailers are in Pahoa and Waimea. Civil defense has its own command trailer. Ocean Safety: They are working on replacing or repairing Act 190 signage for beaches. The County wants to put up signs for all unguarded beaches. However, they have no money budgeted for the signs. SUPPORT SERVICES DIVISION EMS Bureau: They will be accepting two new ambulances, one for Pahoa and one for HonokaÒa. The ambulances come directly from the State Department of Health. They cannot be more than seven years old and have no more than 200,000 miles on the odometer. The replaced ambulance can become a secondary or spare medic. The average life of ambulances from stations such as Kailua, Central, or Pahoa is no more than three years. They have a lot of mileage, especially Pahoa. Pahoa runs about 150-300 miles per shift.