CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The Corpus Christi Fire Department recently went before Corpus Christi City Council to ask for support in applying for the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grant to hire more firefighters.
The grant will help the department work toward having more four-man teams, as opposed to two or three.
"It's almost $16.5 million that FEMA will pay the salaries and benefits of all these firefighters for the first three years," CCFD Deputy Fire Chief Doug Matthijetz said.
He said that having those extra bodies will help bolster the department's overall head count.
"Right now we have about 24 vacancies," Mattijetz said. "Our official compliment is 455 firefighters."
3NEWS spoke with CCFD Battalion Chief Jim Devisser as he was driving back from teaching a class up in College Station. The course centered around incident management and response.
"It helps to prepare those students for those large scale incidents and what it's like to work in a command post or an emergency operations center," he said.
It's that kind of knowledge that Devisser said can also be used here in South Texas, especially if the grant money becomes a reality.
"Or the wind can come up, you could have a wind change, and all of a sudden the wind is blowing back in your face, and by having that four person staffing it helps to maintain that situational awareness," he said.
In the end, Matthijetz said it all boils down to productivity.
"The division of labor, the more people you have to do the work, the more efficient it is," he said.