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January 26, 2017
Honorable Linda Woodard
Board of Trustees
Village of Cayuga Heights
Monthly Report September 2016
We continued the hectic pace from August into September with a total of 53 calls.
There were 28 calls in the Village of Cayuga Heights, 18 calls in the Town of Ithaca and
7 mutual aid requests. We had 29 EMS responses and 24 fire calls. Early in the month
we were called for smoke coming from the roof of a residence on Winthrop Drive. We
were dispatched for a full response from our department as well as all of the automatic
mutual aid from Ithaca and Lansing. We arrived on scene to find that on a chilly morning
with a heavy dew that the sun has caused steam to rise from the caller’s roof as well as
many others on the road. Several times through the month we had multiple calls at the
same time. We are lucky to have such an active membership which allowed us to cover
the multiple alarm days.
We had a very busy month with our membership. We spent many afternoons in the area
of campus speaking with students and residents alike about the benefit of volunteering
with the department. Cornell hosted a public safety event on North Campus that we
attended and spoke with more people about the department. We had our Recruit Dinner
in late September and we had 33 people attend the dinner. We had several more people
who expressed interest in the department but were unable to attend the dinner so we
invited them to come by the station for individual tours and to talk about the process. We
handed out 37 applications for membership. Of the 37 who took applications we
received 24 back by the deadline for interviews. We had an officers meeting to discuss
how much equipment we have to issue and how large a recruit class we would take. We
decided on a class of no more the 18 people. After two full nights of interviews we
ended up with a 2016 Fall Recruit Class of 17 new members. Our department
membership, with the recruits, stands at 67 members. It was a long process to make this
happen and many of our members spent and large amount of time to get the word out
about the department.
We trained hard through September with many drills geared at getting everyone back up
to speed on the trucks and moving hose and using tools. These are strenuous trainings
and were very well attended. We had an ALS assist training to teach our BLS members
how to set up the equipment our paramedics will need on an ALS call. We spent a fair
amount of evenings and weekends getting the checklist process done for the spring
recruits so we do not have that hanging over our heads while we work with the new class.
Looking ahead to October we have two full weekends of recruit training. Recruit training
will take place over two weekends in October as well as a full evening of CPR training
on a weeknight. This is a lot of time for the recruits as well as the members involved in
training them.
We had our annual open house on October 1st this year and we were not expecting a giant
turn out because it was the same weekend as Apple Harvest Festival in Ithaca. This
year’s open house was the best we have had in many years. We were busy all day long as
hundreds of people attended. We had displays from the Cayuga Heights Police and the
Ithaca SWAT team. The Naval ROTC at Cornell came over and set up a table. We had
several demonstrations throughout the day to show off our skills but easily the busiest
display were the two pieces of equipment the village DPW brought up, there were lines to
sit in the earth moving equipment all day long. The open house was so well attended that
we had to go and get more food to cook and hand out.
We look forward to a busy fall of training and welcoming our new members. We hope
that they all enjoy the department as much as the rest of us.
Sincerely,
George Tamborelle
Fire Chief/Fire Superintendent