NAHANT — At the Nahant Board of Selectmen meeting this week, Nahant Fire Chief Austin Antrim spoke on the department’s staffing needs and his proposal of hiring four additional full-time staff.
In his presentation, Antrim began with an overview of the history of the department’s staffing model and addressed why the current staffing model has “failed,” he said. “I know this is a monumental ask – asking for four additional personnel in the town of Nahant, where every department operates with less staffing than would be ideal, but in the fire department, our staffing model was created well over 100 years ago. It’s barely been adjusted throughout the last 100 years, with a couple exceptions, but [the] model itself really is failing, not just in Nahant but really nationwide.”
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has a minimum staffing recommendation of four firefighters per company, and that “anything less puts lives, property, and firefighters at risk,” according to their website.
Antrim is proposing that by adding four additional full-time firefighters, three of them could be on duty at all-times and that additional needs be supplemented by per-diem firefighters, who could then provide a fourth firefighter to be on duty on weekends and during the busier summer months.
This could help resolve the hiring issues they’re facing with their current system, which includes a nationwide decline in volunteers and a lack of applicants who are actually residents. In Nahant, Antrim said that there is a 4:1 ratio of non-residential applicants to residents, which causes a majority of applicants to be rejected as they live too far away to respond to calls in a timely manner.
When Antrim became chief in 2021, the department was down to its lowest number of active call firefighters, ever, he said. Today, the department has just 14 active call firefighters, but when looking at staffing trends over the past 15 years, Antrim has noticed that it has had nearly 50 call firefighters.
As for what’s happened to them, what Antrim has found is that some of them have either moved on or are retiring, including Dennis Ball, who is currently the longest serving person in the department, and Antrim said is set to retire just next month.
There have also been nine of the 12 remaining call firefighters who have had just two years or less of experience; four were hired to fill full-time positions in the town, seven were hired as full-time firefighters in other communities, and another seven have either resigned or were let go due to lack of participation. There have also been eight who did not successfully complete the Fire Academy: one moved out of state, one was medically retired, and one passed away.
Over the past five years, the department has also had to deal with a “snowball effect” of their full-time personnel getting injured and getting sick, Antrim noted. They’ve gone three months with just three full-time employees out, 13 months with two full-time employees out, and 31 months with one full-time employee out, which then causes a significant overhaul for those available. “Whenever we have a full-time employee out, that shift has to be filled by the remaining healthy employees. So, a firefighter’s schedule already exceeds what most people normally work in a work week. And then on top of that, we’re adding, you know, multiple 24-hour shifts for our personnel.
On top of the 24-hour shifts, they’re already working, and we’re reliant on them to come back when they’re off duty every time there’s a medical or some other emergency to staff the station. It’s all of that combined that is sort of created the snowball effect [of] just overburdening and overworking the personnel that we do have, who are our most valuable assets. We’re driving them into the ground.”
To meet the increase in demand, other departments across the state are either already adding additional firefighters or are in the process of doing so, Antrim said, including in Topsfield and Rowley. “I really believe this needs to happen as quickly as possible,” he noted.
In terms of next steps, Town Administrator Alison Nieto said that Antrim will now present this topic to the Finance Committee.
