Sheldon, Iowa — The Sheldon Fire Company had a busy year in 2020.
Assistant Fire Chief Brad Hindt tells us they responded to a total of 162 911 calls for service. Of that total, 14 calls were accidents. Twenty-three calls were for fire alarms for which the cause could be determined. Six of them were alarms with no known cause.
Firefighters also responded to 47 calls to assist SCAT, and nine COVID-19 decontaminations. Hindt tells us that eight of the ambulance calls were assistance with lifting the patient AND COVID decontamination.
He says they responded to 23 fires, 17 rural fires, 7 vehicle fires, 6 other hazards such as downed powerlines, gas leaks or spills, and carbon monoxide alarm activations.
Hindt tells us they also responded to two calls of wheelchairs getting caught in rugs. He says in one call it shredded the rug and the wheelchair got caught. In the other one the rug was in an entry to a building and somehow got caught in the wheels of the powered chair.
He says they also helped out other departments with six mutual aid calls, and there were two good intent calls.
Some of the larger calls included a house fire on April 24th that took 5.25 hours, a tree dump fire on July 11th that took 5 hours, and a barn fire on November 4th that also took 5 hours.
Firefighters got to the station in the same average time as in 2019 — about three minutes. It took them slightly longer to get to the scene. In 2019 it took them an average of 6.6 minutes from the time the page went out until they arrived on-scene. In 2020 it was an average of 7.3 minutes. Average call length was a little longer too, with 41.1 minutes. In 2019 it was 31.9 minutes. In 2020 they started keeping track of how long calls took including cleanup — and for the first year that stat is available, the average was 62 minutes.
Very close to the same average number of firefighters responded to calls as the previous year, with 16.2 in 2020 versus 16.3 in 2019.
Hindt says the 162 calls required 2932.6 man-hours. He says they also logged 1358.5 training hours in 2020.
