Top Fire Department officials told a City Council committee Jan. 28 that the department’s policy of “promoting” Emergency Medical Technicians to become Firefighters, who are paid tens of thousands of dollars more a year, had produced a major gap in Emergency Medical Service staffing.
As a consequence, they conceded that even as the city continued to set records for EMS call volume, and response times for those calls were rising, there had been a decline in the number of ambulance crews available, a circumstance they said would take “a couple of years” to rectify.
The troubling admission came before the Council Committee on Fire and Emergency Management.
Administration officials cited a confluence of factors: the physical limitations of the FDNY’s Queens training facility at Fort Totten that’s slated for a multi-million-dollar upgrade; a national shortage of EMTs and Paramedics; and “a churn” of 1,200 EMS members into firefighting jobs every four years when the promotion exam was offered.