RAPID CITY, S.D. – The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally tends to be a time that extra calls go in to the Rapid City Fire Department (RCFD), however this yr stored crews busier with a couple of calls to help a scene.
The RCFD had a mean yr for the rally with almost 700 calls, averaging about 70 calls a shift per day.
“The rally tends to see a bit of little bit of a rise in name quantity, because of the variety of of us within the space, however we nonetheless have to reply to all of the medical emergencies. We had quite a few motorized vehicle accidents that week, quite a few fires — whether or not or not it’s construction fires, grass fires or smaller fires throughout that point,” Brian Povandra, Rapid City Division Chief of Fire Operations, mentioned.
With Tuesday, Aug. 9 and Wednesday, Aug. 10 being their busiest days, that they had 86 and 84 calls respectively — answering mutual support calls exterior the division’s regular district.
“We had on-duty personnel reply to these incidents. We needed to backfill the stations to take care of regular operations. So our firefighters needed to come again in,” Povandra mentioned. “We despatched pages out and backfilled the stations so we might nonetheless preserve regular operations throughout these bigger incidents.”
Crews assisted with a grass fire north of Wall on Tuesday. Later Tuesday night and persevering with into Wednesday, the Rapid City/Pennington County Water Rescue Team and ROV Team assisted with a drowning at Angostura.
Wednesday morning, the Heavy Rescue Team helped the Sturgis Volunteer Fire Department with a semi-truck that ran right into a home.“Our firefighters practice day in and time out and so they’re ready for any incident. We’re an all-hazards division that responds to quite a few completely different incidents. These incidents simply occur to be bigger ones, however our personnel are skilled and prepared to reply to them,” Povandra mentioned. “They deal with them as professionally as we hope they might. All of our personnel did a improbable job of mitigating the scenes they have been on throughout that point.”
Throughout the ten days on the rally, RCFD responded to 444 EMS calls, 14 fires 25 motorized vehicle accidents and 213 different incidents.
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