Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The massive fire at Hampton Farms outside Portales on April 15 did more than destroy the peanut processing plant. It also exposed staffing challenges at the Portales Fire Department.
Firefighters from around the region responded to help PFD at the peanut plant, but the facility continued to burn for days, requiring personnel to keep an eye on it. The night of April 17, with the peanut mill still requiring oversight, responders received a call for a house fire in the 700 block of North Avenue M. Four minutes after that, an ambulance call came in from the northwest zone of the city.
“Fully staffed we only have eight personnel on each shift,” Portales Fire Chief T.J. Cathey said. There were only six responders available to make the initial attack on the house fire.
“When the ambulance call came out, the officer in charge was forced to divert personnel to that call for service, leaving the initial attack personnel severely understaffed and all stations empty,” Cathey said.
The National Fire Prevention Association has standards set in place for fire service operations.
For a structure fire like the one that destroyed the Portales home on April 17, NFPA recommends 16 fire personnel respond.
“Thankfully, we have great personnel that go above and beyond who came in to assist but that takes time,” Cathey said. “More emergency response time is more of a home burned, more damage done during a stroke, more heart muscle damage during a heart attack.”
In 2023, Cathey said the PFD’s average response time for EMS was 3.9 minutes and 6.3 minutes for fire.
Also in 2023, Cathey said PFD had 857 instances where multiple calls for service came in at or around the same time.
“In a succession of calls, the first call has a 2-3 minute response time, the second a 3-4 minute; but after that our response capability is overran,” Cathey said.
Clovis Fire Chief Mike Nolen told the News that while there’s a universal shortage of fire personnel, Clovis is not experiencing problems with coverage on any calls.
But retaining and recruiting personnel is a challenge throughout eastern New Mexico.
“We pay what we can, but does that match the big cities (including Amarillo and Lubbock)? No, and that’s where we run into the problem,” Nolen said.
Cathey said response times are critical for emergency teams and personnel shortages impact those times.
“The best example I can give is for someone to try to breathe through a straw for an extended period of time, which is an example of what it would be like to have difficulty breathing and waiting for the EMS crew or trapped in a structure fire and waiting for the fire crew,” Cathey said.
