Pullman’s fire chief presented the 2016 annual fire department report to the city council at their Tuesday meeting.

In his report, Pullman Fire Chief Mike Heston mentioned a wide array of statistics as well as changes the department is undertaking to improve efficiency. One such change is from a three to a four-platoon staffing system, Heston said. Through this system, the workweek for staff is reduced from 50 to 48 hours. Back-to-back call shifts are also reduced.

“The four-platoon shift, we did an 18-month trial starting last September … It gives us more flexibility in staffing,” Heston said. “When you go home, it’s not like you get to go home and relax. You get kid duty and yard duty and all of those things.”

Heston said call volume for the fire department increased 8.2 percent from 2015 to 2016, and the department responded to 2,832 calls.

There was a total of 690 fire suppression calls with 92 actual fires recorded and three reported structural fires, Heston said. Furthermore, 2,142 medical emergency events, up 131 calls or 6.5 percent from 2015, made up 76 percent of the department’s call volume. Of the 70 percent of calls that had a victim who had to be transported, 47 percent required the victim to receive advanced life support from paramedics.

The full report can be found on the City of Pullman Fire Department website under annual reports.

In 2016, Pullman was ranked as the 26th safest college town in America, according to the annual Safest Cities in America report by SafeWise, a security systems website. The city was in the site’s top 30 for the second consecutive year.

The City Council approved Pullman City Ordinance 17-6 to establish a new process within the code of ethics for City Council members to disclose possible conflicts of interest.

Resolution 46-17 was also approved. The resolution authorizes a professional agreement between the city and Resource Planning Unlimited, a Moscow environmental consulting business, to investigate and remove the existence of any possible large colonies of fecal coliform bacteria within the city’s water basins.

Coliform bacteria can indicate disease-causing organisms are present but are not pathogenic themselves, according to an April report from the Washington Department of Health. If large numbers are found, there is a greater risk that other pathogenic bacterium are in the water environment.

Rob Buchert, the city’s stormwater services program manager, brought the resolution to the council.

“This study that’s being proposed addresses the remaining five stormwater outfalls identified in [the Washington State Department of Ecology’s] report as needing some additional investigation and assessment on how our stormwater program has been,” Buchert said.

The final report of the findings of the project will be reviewed by the Washington State Department of Ecology.