FOLEY - The numbers are in for the FY21 Foley Fire Department activity report, and officials say those numbers are staggering.

“Our call volume has jumped drastically,” said Chief Joey Darby. “I wish I had the answers to tell you why that has happened, I see some things that trend that I can speculate why some of that has happened, but the facts are that we’re a whole lot busier than we have been in previous years.”

Darby said part of the increase was due to 300 calls during Hurricane Sally in September 2020. Still those calls did not explain the overall increase. For the last fiscal year, the Foley Fire Department is trending 2,465 calls, approximately a 38 percent increase in the department’s normal call volume. Darby said to come to that estimate, the 300 calls attributed to Hurricane Sally last year were subtracted from the total calls in 2020.

“I think it’s fair to pull those Sally calls out, that’s a spike in calls,” Darby said. “Going even further back to FY19, we were at 1,609 calls. As I look at trends over two- or three-year periods, we’re up drastically, up 11 percent from FY19 to FY20 and now 38 percent from FY20 to FY21.”

Darby said with the department staying extremely busy and the call volumes increasing, he feels it’s time to start discussing and planning expansion of services. According to Darby, the demands are there, as the department has also seen a large number of fire inspections completed.

“If you look at the last fiscal year, we still hit over 2,800 inspections in a time when it was difficult to get into businesses, so I’m very proud of their efforts on the prevention side,” said Darby.

During the second October council meeting, the city council approved the purchase of a 2023 Custom Fire Pumper for the Foley Fire Department. The purchase was budgeted and, according to Darby, will keep the fleet up-to-date and prepare for the future expansion of the department. With current delays, Darby said the new pumper is anticipated to arrive in approximately 395 days.

“When I think about tracking numbers for the last five plus years, I’ve tracked our increase in demand in that 8 percent range, anywhere from 5, 10, 11 percent, so about 8 percent range average,” Darby said. “That’s something that’s in some ways easier to plan for, but when we skip 38 percent in volume in the demand on our services, that is extremely difficult to plan for. We’ve got to expand services, which is why we’re already bringing things to the agenda that’s one step in that direction.”