The sun is barely out when the men at Station 9 start their day. Over cups of coffee, they discuss the shift changeover — how many calls woke them up last night, if something happened to the truck or the equipment and what they could prepare for dinner. They joke around about food preferences and discuss plans with family on their days off, then the alarm sounds again and it's back to business.
On a regular day at the station, Lt. Colby Perryman starts his morning around 6 a.m. and sometimes there’s no time for breakfast or coffee before the clock starts ticking. A single ding gets four firefighters out of their chairs and into the engine truck, prepared for an emergency medical call.
From the moment of the first ding, the team has a minute to get out of the station. This is not a hard-to-meet standard on a regular situation, Perryman said, but gets trickier when the alarm catches you in the middle of a shower and it’s time to gear up.
“The socks is where it always gets you,” he said. “Socks on wet feet.”
Firefighters work long hours, deal with mandatory overtime and brave emergency after emergency, but the firefighters of Gainesville Fire Rescue try to make the best out of their time on the job. With problems ranging from short staffing and underfunding to broken air conditioners and the dinner menu, they fight everyday struggles with jokes and courage.
Mandatory overtime and attrition
Perryman has worked at GFR for 10 years and has seen many people come and go. The department is constantly hiring and training new firefighters, pointing to an ongoing issue with attrition, he said.
Under their current schedule of 24/48, they have one day of work and two days off, but the reality of mandatory overtime leads them to work many back-to-back shifts. After a certain amount of nonstop working, Perryman said, there is no time to even spend the money they earn.
“Eventually these guys just want to go home,” he said. “They want to see their kids.”
A night in the station is often a night with little sleep. On good nights, they only get woken up two or three times; on busy nights, they can get nonstop calls until 4 a.m. Even when the odds are in their favor and the alarm stays quiet until the daylight, Perryman said they are too wired and alert to sleep peacefully through the night.
Due to safety and health concerns from such a restless schedule, the International Association of Firefighters local union reached an agreement with the Gainesville City Commission in November 2023 to change over to a 24/72 schedule. This change is set to begin in September and will give firefighters one day of work and three days off to rest.
This is among the changes the department and the city have made to attract new applicants and retain their current staff as well. David Asbell, 42, is one of the firefighters whose decision to stay was largely influenced by the upcoming schedule change.
“Part of getting that schedule was to stop the bleeding. We were trying to get people to stop leaving,” Asbell said. “I’m one of those people.”
Separate from his job as a driver at Station 9, Asbell works part-time as a registered nurse at UF Health Shands. He is a firefighter because he loves the job, so the change of schedule helps him balance both positions without having to give up either.
Compared to similar-sized fire departments in nearby cities, Asbell said, the benefits and the pay for Gainesville are not enough to keep people who come from other cities. In his nine years at GFR, he has seen around 150 people get hired, yet they are still always understaffed.
Overtime is often due to understaffing and holes in scheduling. Even if Asbell is scheduled for only 24 hours, if the next firefighter does not show up for the morning changeover, he ends up working 48 hours.
City growth and funding cuts
These long hours are tougher when calls increase, and with the city’s rapid growth, the call volume has only gone up over the past couple years.
Gainesville has grown exponentially in the past decade, but its fire department has not. The city’s population has increased by about 17% since 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Based on GFR annual reports, the fire department has added about 20 sworn personnel in the same time period. Last year, that meant 189 such employees covered the whole city.
With nine stations spread across the city, GFR provides a full service of fire calls, EMS, technical rescue, hazardous materials, airport rescue, tactical medicine and community health.
As the city grows outward, Deputy Fire Chief Joseph Hillhouse said, it grows a lot faster than the fire department expands, so units have to travel further away from the station. Each truck has an area of coverage around them as they move through the city, but when there are more calls than trucks, the division of coverage begins to blur.
The number of incidents GFR responds to within the city limits has increased by 19.7% from 2020 to 2023, according to annual reports, while staff numbers have remained steady. The department’s size has also remained the same, with Station 1 being the most recently built in 2018 and no major expansion in the past decade, Hillhouse said.
One significant factor in growing the fire department is funding, and most of it comes from the city.
“You can’t really separate the fire department from the city,” Hillhouse said. “So anything that affects the city budget is going to end up affecting the fire department.”
The city budget for GFR increased by around $5 million between Fiscal Year 2023 and 2024, but this increase was based on “zero-based” budgeting, Hillhouse said. This strategy means they looked into what was already being spent in the department and adjusted the funds for the next fiscal year.
Additionally, the city budget is facing cuts of $6.8 million from the General Fund Transfer, the measure of revenue Gainesville Regional Utilities contributes to the city. This may be reflected in further cuts of staff positions or trucks from the stations as the city plans its next budget.
Other sources of revenue help GFR’s operations, such as fire assessment revenue, which can only be used to cover the costs of fire-related operations, and grants that fund most of their community health programs.
Travel and response times increase
The array of factors affecting the fire department’s funding, staffing and expansion are also affecting the firefighters’ commute. During a June 20 City Commission meeting, Chief Joe Dixon shared GFR’s quarterly update and showed an increase in the travel time for calls.
From the moment the alarm first sounds, firefighters are timed for their alarm handling, turnout time, travel time and total response time. The national standard travel time set by the National Fire Protection Association is four minutes. This measures the duration between when the first unit due to respond leaves the station to when they first arrive at the scene. GFR reported travel times of almost seven minutes in 2023 and a slight increase from the beginning of Jan. 1 to July 1, 2024.
There are various reasons travel time increases, Hillhouse said, but the biggest one is density. As more people come into the city, the traffic and the roads get more difficult to travel.
David Asbell drives engine 9 through those roads every shift and the intersections of Archer Road with Clark Butler Boulevard and Southwest 34th Street are hard to clear and impossible to avoid. In the next month, traffic is bound to get worse in those areas.
“If you want to have a lot of fun, [work] on a game day,” Asbell joked.
Although the University of Florida has its own police department, fire rescue services are the city’s responsibility. Once classes start, crews from different GFR stations often find themselves having to travel further from their area to attend calls from freshmen hanging clothes from sprinklers in the dorms or trash fires and drunk calls on football game days, he said.
During the Fall and Spring semesters, the call volume increases exponentially, and so does the traffic and density of the roads, so travel times are not likely to go down for the rest of the year.
The men inside the truck
Higher call volumes mean busier nights for firefighters. The weekend after the Fourth of July, Asbell worked 10 calls after 10 p.m. and barely got a nap in before he had to do changeover to the next shift.
Some days are more difficult than others, either due to nonstop calls or emergencies that include injured people or complicated medical situations. But the men at Station 9 find comfort in the time they spend together.
“[It’s] camaraderie,” Asbell said. “When you hang out with the guys, you get a chance to make light of things and that really helps if we have serious calls.”
Station 9 is a modular station built in 2017. Driver Operator Kien Cade said it was supposed to be a temporary solution until they could build a new full station, but seven men still live and work in the small mobile home with broken floors.
Despite the size of the building, Cade said the crew makes the best of the situation.
“I do love it,” he said. “It’s like any other job, there are good and bad things, but it’s rewarding.”
Other GFR stations have bigger spaces and newer buildings, such as Station 1, which is a technical rescue specialty station. But even these bigger stations, like Station 2, a hazmat specialty station, have their issues. The firefighters there have been coming back to a building with only half of the air conditioning working.
The area of the station with the bedrooms and showers had a broken air conditioner for over a week, Cade said, and to combat the 90-degree heat of the summer, the crew built makeshift insulation with tarps and tape and bought portable air conditioners.
Regardless the firefighters keep a positive and slightly sarcastic attitude when they’re together. They joke about the shows they watch on their living room TV or the picky eater of the group that complicates their meals.
The crew goes to Publix during their lunch break to grab everything from fried chicken to mac and cheese and fruits and buy whatever is needed for dinner. At night, they prepare and eat a family-style dinner at the table, waiting for the next ding.
