The Village of New Richmond is located along the Ohio River, approximately twenty-five minutes from downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a growing bedroom community with excellent village services and premier school system.

 

New Richmond Fire and EMS Department was established in 2006 to protect New Richmond Village and part of nearby Ohio Township with five full-time, twelve part-time, and twenty five volunteer employees responding from two stations.

 

Its annual operating budget is approximately $ 500,000 generated by fire and EMS tax levies, a contract with Pierce Township, and ambulance/fire/rescue service billing. Its fire protection rating from the Insurance Services Office (ISO) is a 4/9. Staffing at NRFEMS is three to four paid employees weekdays and two on weeknights and weekends when more volunteers are available. Almost all paid employees and about one-third of our volunteers are certified both as firefighters and emergency medical technicians which greatly increases staff flexibility as the nature of each detail dictates.

 

NRFEMS regularly gives and receives automatic mutual aid (AMA) to boost the number of firefighters available on emergency scenes. Having adequate personnel available promotes a safer, more efficient emergency scene environment and helps the department meet national standards. Informal, incident management assistance teams (IMAT) are used by NRFEMS and many progressive, southwestern Ohio departments to more effectively manage emergency scenes. Our IMAT consists of the chiefs of several neighboring departments who are all notified of structure fire details in New Richmond’s territory and may also be paged, as needed, for other types of details.

 

Emergency dispatching is by Clermont County Communications Center located at the county seat in Batavia, Ohio. Backups to it are the Union Township Police and Fire Dispatch and Northeast Communications Center. All can dispatch calls in support of each other, if needed. Alerting of details is via Motorola Minitor V tone and voice pager by a multi-site, simulcast, VHf paging system established in May 2007 operating on radio frequency 155.175 MHz. Two-way radio communication is via a Motorola 800 Mhz., digital, trunked radio system. Fire dispatch talk group audio is “patched” to the paging system to allow monitoring of radio messages by personnel without a two-way radio. A first alarm assignment for structure fires includes one ladder company, three engine companies, one ambulance, one AMA rapid intervention team (RIT) and a mini-incident management team (IMAT).