Three fire captain promotions in Erlanger — Richard Bohl, Randy McMullen and Justin Brinkman — to the rank of battalion chief at Tuesday night’s Erlanger City Council meeting served as the capstone for a rank restructuring process that’s been about a year in the making, said Erlanger Fire/EMS Chief Randy Godsey.
“Tonight was a big night for us,” Godsey said to the mayor and city council members. “It’s been in the works for a year, so to finally see it come to fruition is just an amazing event for me.”
Andrew Siska, a new firefighter and EMT, was also sworn in during the meeting.
The rank of battalion chief is new and is a dedicated command role for dealing with emergency situations as they arise. Each battalion chief is responsible for managing a particular shift.
Before this, managing fire emergency calls fell to captains, who accompanied the other crew members in a truck.
Godsey said the problem was that captains had to choose between performing the emergency work with the rest of the crew or taking a command role once on site, depending on the circumstances.
A captain wouldn’t know which role was warranted until arriving, which caused inefficiency and extra stress for the captains.
“What this has done is streamline that,” Godsey told LNK nky after the meeting, saying that now crews and captains can reliably look to the battalion chiefs for command.
“They [the battalion chiefs] know that they’re taking command, and the guys that arrived at the scene no long have to make that decision,” Godsey added.
“It really streamlines our on-scene operations,” Godsey said.
The next meeting of the Elranger City Council will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m. at the city building on Commonwealth Avenue.