Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon said Tuesday he couldn’t say for sure if more lives would have been saved if more firefighters had been at the scene of the devastating fire at the Gabriel House Assisted Living Residence — a claim made by fire union leaders.
“I can’t disagree with the union’s assertion that if there were more firefighters there that we could have done things more efficiently and better,'' he said at a press conference. “I don’t know if it would have saved lives. That’s speculation.”
Bacon added to a growing debate about firefighter staffing among city and fire officials in the aftermath of the Gabriel House fire where nine people died and at least 30 were injured on Sunday night. He said he’s consistently called on Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan for more staffing.
“Since the very first meeting that I had with him, I’ve been advocating for more firefighters in the city of Fall River to make the job safer. The current model that we have is less firefighters and more overtime. And that’s worked for us, but it’s also working our firefighters to the bone,” Bacon said.
As firefighters arrived at Gabriel House, flames were coming through the front door and heavy smoke was fast spreading through the entire three-story structure. Residents were hanging out of windows crying for help; roughly 70 elderly residents, some immobile or in wheelchairs, couldn’t get out of the building on their own.
While the cause of the five-alarm fire is still under investigation, hours after flames had been extinguished, officials from the firefighters’ union told gathered media that the department was understaffed. They pointed to national staffing guidelines which aren’t met by the Fall River fire department.
On Tuesday, Coogan called union comments “a touch quick.”
“I’m kind of a little taken back that less than 24 hours after the tragedy, politics enters into the equation,” Coogan told GBH’s Boston Public Radio.
Michael O’Regan, the Fall River Firefighters union president, defended his comments.
“Politics is what dictates what type of a budget we’re going to have, whether or not the city likes to roll the dice with public safety,” O’Regan said. “Had we had the extra men, we could have reached quite a few more of those impacted and it would have made an appreciable difference.”
In a written statement, Coogan added that the city takes concerns of union leadership “seriously.”
“We respect the role of national and local union leadership in advocating for its members and for public safety,” Coogan said. “We also recognize that any large scale emergency brings with it a range of complex emotions and legitimate questions.”
In the statement, Coogan said that an investigation is ongoing that will look into staffing among other issues like response times and building safety. He also said the city hired consultants in February to look at fire coverage, taking into account demographic changes, and to look at how deployments could impact response times to meet national standards. That study is expected to be completed in the next few months.
Staffing levels for firefighters are up to individual municipalities, but fire departments look to national guidelines from the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, which says there should be four firefighters per truck. The standards are a minimum for safety, determined from a broad range of expert input, according to the association.
Curt Floyd, a director at the National Fire Protection Association, said every community should do risk assessments based on things like populations and building structures, and weigh them against budgets.
“Each community has to determine what their risk tolerance is for that — and they have to balance that out when making those decisions,” Floyd said.
Fall River currently has six fire stations with 164 personnel, according to the city website. Firefighter union officials say only two of Fall River’s 10 fire companies are staffed at the national standard of four fire fighters per truck. The remaining eight operate with just three.
Ed Kelly, president of the International Fire Fighters Association, told GBH’s Boston Public Radio on Tuesday that the staffing wasn’t enough for a fire like the one at the Gabriel House.
“At the end of the day, had that department been fully staffed, like say the neighboring city New Bedford, they would have had eight more firefighters on scene,'' he said. ”That would have been eight more people, firefighters throwing ground ladders, rescuing people out of that 2nd or 3rd floor of that building.“
A 2010 study from the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, found the size of firefighting crews has a “substantial effect on the fire service’s ability to protect lives and property in residential fires.”
The study showed firefighting crews were able to complete “22 essential firefighting and rescue tasks in a typical residential structure 30 percent faster than two-person crews and 25 percent faster than three-person crews.”
Debate about firefighter staffing has been ongoing. In late 2024, Fall River received $1.6 million in grant money from a state fund for public safety staffing, to help “keep safe levels of firefighter staffing,” said Chief Bacon at the time.
Communities like Fall River also often look to federal grants to boost staffing levels at fire departments. Bacon said Tuesday that the fire department had recently applied for a federal SAFER grant that would help raise staffing on two more trucks to the national standard of four firefighters.
In a city budget meeting in late May, O’Regan, a firefighter in the city for more than 25 years, called out the mayor for chipping away at the fire department budget over time, citing failures of fire trucks and crumbling stations, some with rodents, mold and raw sewage. He also said the fire department was running below critical staffing levels, with firefighters burning out from overtime work.
“We are continually asked to do more with less,” O’Regan told city councilors. “It is not sustainable.”
