Chiefs hope new fire agreement improves response times

Fires, medical emergencies, and disasters don't care about the invisible boundaries between towns and counties. And now, neither do the emergency responders. 

Local fire departments signed a landmark agreement on Aug. 27 to eliminate barriers between department jurisdiction and allow the closest firefighting unit to respond. In many cases, the previous system required agencies to request aid on an incident-by-incident basis, potentially delaying response times. 

“As a resident or a visitor to Doña Ana County, you're not really looking to see what's the name on the side of the fire truck or the rescue unit that shows up to help you,” said Doña Ana County Fire Chief Shannon Cherry. 

The automatic aid agreement is between the county fire department, the New Mexico State University Fire Department, the city of Sunland Park, the city of Las Cruces, the NASA/White Sands Test Facility and the town of Mesilla. It replaces a patchwork system of mutual aid agreements. 

Those agreements were between individual departments and are required documents that enable inter-departmental cooperation. But with individual agreements come individual problems. 

“There could be some inconsistencies between them when you have so many individual agreements,” Cherry said. “Whereas, this way, everyone gets to be on the same sheet of music.”

This agreement will relieve burdens on the department for Las Cruces, which has the valley’s densest population and highest concentration of service calls, according to LCFD Chief Jason Smith. He said that’s most relevant when the department’s resources are already concentrated on a major incident. 

Smith referenced a fire about a year ago that required nearly all the department’s resources. 

“I think it left us with one ambulance and maybe one or two engines left throughout the city,” Smith said. 

“So under that previous agreement, if we had another structure fire at the same time, or say, we had a bad vehicle accident with multiple people injured, our arriving officer on scene would have to evaluate everything, make an assessment and then make a request to see if our neighboring departments in Mesilla or NMSU or the county could come and help us out,” Smith said. 

Both Smith and Cherry said several factors came together to allow this change. For one, almost all of the fire department chiefs are relatively new to their executive positions. Another factor was the department’s new radio system, which channels all calls through the same system. 

“It was a synergistic effect where there's enough new people that were like, ‘Hey, let's try this other approach,’” Smith said.