Warren County’s emergency medical services system is at a tipping point.

And county leaders say the fire service isn’t far behind.

The county commissioners this week approved a “Community Risk Reduction Plan” that grew out of a state report on the county’s fire system.

“I think that we have just as much of a fire problem as EMS,” Director of Public Safety Ken McCorrison said, noting that the “call volume isn’t as high.”

Consultants on the plan highlight that 90 percent of the state’s fire service is volunteer and, looking at Warren County, is operating a few “assumptions.”

One is that there are too few trained firefighters in the county and that “there are more fire stations in the county than necessary to manage the risk.”

The end result is that, the report states, “when it once took one fire department to handle a structure fire, it now takes three.”

Consultants concluded that the departments have “too many competing priorities” beyond fighting fires, including fundraising, training and non-fire response requests.

Statistically, the report details that there are 19 fire departments in the county and that call volume from data taken between 2019 and 2022 shows the lowest call volume in Scandia (125) and the highest in the City of Warren (1,246).

Within those statistics, the consultants noted that “half the county’s fire stations carry about 70 percent of the volume of firefighting calls/dispatches in the county annually.”

Reducing the risk identified will include public education.

“Changing behaviors to reduce the incidents of cooking fires and other careless behaviors that require firefighting services can assist the county with the problem of too few firefighters,” consultants conclude.

The plan also calls for “shared service agreements” and says that county fire departments “should look for opportunities for merger or consolidation” but adds that the “plan’s development team suggested that, instead of mergers, the plan should recommend the sharing of resources and shared service agreements.”

McCorrison described that as “strategic initiatives in strategic areas” to “make sure resources are available in each corner of the county to handle the responses that are needed.”

The plan spells out specific tasks for county elected officials, the Department of Public Safety, municipal officials and “strategic partners.”

McCorrison said that four of the seven takeaways for his department are already done or in process.