DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Davenport Fire Department responds to calls for help daily and now others are responding in its time of need.
On Wednesday, April 12, ten new recruits were sworn in at City Hall after they had already been officially hired last December.
Davenport Fire Chief Mike Carlsten, who has 29 years of experience fighting fires, said he hasn't seen these numbers in decades.
"The last time in my career that we saw this many firefighters hired all at once was back in 1994."
That was the same year that the department opened up a new fire station. Today, several years of turnover have created more openings than usual.
"We're starting to see an increasing number of people that will be here for a shorter period of time, and then move on to the next chapter of their life," Carlsten said. "I'm not exactly sure why. I think some of it is just, there's more opportunities out there. And people just say, 'I've been a firefighter, I want to take a look at what the next chapter is in their life and tackle that'."
Right now, Chief Carlsten is just thankful that his department is at almost full capacity. The department is allowed to have 137 personnel, with two of those being civilians.
As of Friday, it has 134 full-time firefighters — just one position short of a full team.
"We're very fortunate. And our recruiting efforts, we had a lot of success. And it wasn't just my doing for that," Carlsten added. "We worked hard with the Human Resources at City Hall to make sure that they helped us develop a plan that we could actually implement, make sure we got our message out to different schools, groups, areas that we traditionally didn't talk to."
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