Report from the Fire Company January 6-19
January 6-19
In this two-week period, the ambulance responded to 41 calls for medical assistance, to Swarthmore, Rutledge, Morton, Springfield, Ridley, and Nether Providence. The calls were for a variety of emergencies, including cardiac emergency, choking, seizures, hypertension, a fall, head injury, psychiatric emergency, syncopal episode, respiratory difficulty, tachycardia, pediatric emergency, and extreme pain.
In addition, the fire company responded to:
Seven automatic alarms, including for smoke detector activation, a waterflow alarm, and two instances of a manual fire alarm being pulled.
Two building alarms, one for a garage fire (Springfield) and one for a house fire with smoke coming out of the front door (Ridley).
Two carbon monoxide alarms.
Two car accidents, one in Swarthmore and one in Morton-Rutledge, both involving injuries.
One cover assignment for Middletown Township.
Two elevator rescues (111 S. Chester Road, Swarthmore, and 700 Avondale Road, Wallingford).
13 mutual aid calls to Morton-Rutledge, Nether Providence, Ridley, Springfield, and Middletown.
Explainer: Mutual Aid Call vs. Cover Assignment
In this week’s fire company report, Rich Cresson details both a number of mutual aid calls, or assists, and one cover assignment, or cover-up. We asked him to explain the difference. This is what he told us.
Mutual aid call: A mutual aid call, or assist, is any call to help another fire department. This could be a call to a building fire, an auto accident, a brush fire, or any other type of call. Calls for mutual air are becoming ever more frequent with the shortage of volunteers in the fire service. In order to supply sufficient personnel to manage emergencies, incidents that in prior years would have been handled by a single fire department are now often assists.
Cover assignment: In a cover assignment, also known as a cover-up, the covering fire department goes into the firehouse of the requesting department in order to be available to cover the district in the event of another emergency. The covering fire department is not ordinarily called to the initial emergency, but that does sometimes happen.
