Sheldon, Iowa — The Sheldon Fire Company has released a summary of their activity last year.
According to Sheldon Assistant Fire Chief Brad Hindt, the fire department responded to a total of 123 9-1-1 calls. Of those calls, 31 were for fire or sprinkler alarms. Fourteen were actual fire calls. Two were rural fire calls. Three were what they call “good intent”. There were eight mutual aid calls, which are calls to which the department is paged to help out another agency — usually another fire department. The Sheldon Fire Company responded to two explosions in 2019 and one sandbagging event.
They also responded to sixteen car accidents, assisted the Sheldon Community Ambulance Team or SCAT 40 times, helped with one water rescue, responded to one carbon monoxide alarm, two car fires, and two EMS calls.
Hindt says that the average time to roll to the station was nearly three minutes, which is just a touch longer than in 2018 when it was 2.76 minutes. Their average time between being paged and arriving on-scene was 6.6 minutes, down from 7.24 last year. The average number of firefighters to respond to a call was 16.3. He says they had about 1092.3 man-hours for the 123 calls.
Hindt tells us their longest call of the year was on July 23rd, which was the Deluxe Feed explosion. He says they were on that scene for 4.6 hours. The Ag Partners explosion on June 14th was a little shorter at 3.6 hours, and their next-longest call was a mutual aid call to Archer on June 10th for 3.2 hours. Hindt says they also logged 1573.5 hours of in-house training in 2019.
