Seminole County plans to hire up to 30 additional firefighters and paramedics in the coming months after recently receiving a $7.3 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The new hires will be stationed primarily in the county’s fast-growing southwest side, which includes the busy state roads 436 and 434 corridors and Interstate 4, where motor vehicle accidents often occur, according to county fire officials.
“The Seminole County Fire Department is fortunate to receive this grant that will provide service enhancements in the most densely populated areas of Seminole County,” Seminole Fire Chief Otto Drozd said. “It’s going to help us with call volume.”
The Seminole Fire Department currently has just over 450 frontline firefighters and paramedics serving in 20 stations throughout the county’s unincorporated areas, and in the cities of Altamonte Springs, Winter Springs and Casselberry.
Also, the county recently hired 23 additional firefighters and paramedics to help with the increasing number of calls for service in recent years because of more road traffic and Seminole’s 14% increase in population over the past decade. The average starting salary for new firefighters is currently about $42,500 a year, plus health insurance and retirement benefits.
Each fire call can require up to 18 agency personnel to respond.
Now, with the additional firefighters and paramedics expected to start in February, it will allow the agency to operate more efficiently across the county because it will free up additional personnel to respond to more emergency calls, Drozd said.
“In the Altamonte Springs area, there hasn’t been any [fire department] resources added since the mid-1990s,” Drozd said. “So, this is to make up for that.”
In Seminole’s rural east side, firefighters have increasingly been tasked to fight brush fires that spark during the dry winter and spring seasons.
Like similar agencies across the country, Seminole Fire Department has been impacted by high-call volumes and ambulatory transports related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August, agency officials urged Seminole residents to limit 911 calls to emergencies only because the number of ambulances available to transport patients reached a “crisis level” of about 30%.
This came after Seminole fire officials in March began seeing a higher number of monthly ambulance transports than in recent years. And in July, the agency transported more than 3,000 people by ambulance to area hospitals. That’s the highest number in recent history, according to county data.
The Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response [SAFER] grant helps communities add more personnel. It is the largest that the Seminole Fire Department has ever received from the federal government. It will help pay for the firefighters’ and paramedics’ salaries for three years.
For one community, whose grant is ending, several firefighters will need to find new employment.
The city of Mount Dora hired 12 firefighters in 2018 after it received a SAFER grant for about $1.3 million. At the time, the fast-growing Lake County city planned to build a third fire station and needed new firefighters to staff that new facility.
However, Mount Dora decided against building the new station last January, primarily because the COVID-19 pandemic slowed growth.
Mount Dora’s SAFER grant money runs out in December, and city officials decided this summer to keep only three of those dozen new firefighters hired with the grant money. Two other firefighters have since left Mount Dora, and their positions were not filled. And the city is now working with area communities to hire the remaining seven firefighters.
But Seminole fire officials said they anticipate keeping the new staffing positions after the grant money runs out because of the county’s growth.
“At the end of the three years, we are going to evaluate the effect that the additional staffing has had,” Drozd said.
mcomas@orlandosentinel.com
