Fire call volume on the rise in De Pere

DE PERE – De Pere’s fire department responded to 3,463 calls last year, including 2,922 EMS calls and 541 fire calls.

While that’s only a 1.88% increase in total calls over the past year, it’s a 27% rise in total calls over the last five years and a 48.6% increase in total calls over the last 10 years.

Since 2014, the earliest the data were available, call volume has risen 56.62%.
De Pere Fire Chief Brett Jansen updated the Common Council on the past year’s department activity at a recent meeting of the Common Council.

He said his department’s average response time is four minutes, with the average turnout time — the time it takes between the tone to sound at the station and the time the rig leaves the station — being two minutes.

That’s good, according to Jensen, but they’re always trying to improve.

“When you start getting to that eight-minute time, that’s when the recommendation is to start looking at how do we place stations around, do we add a station in the future,” Jansen said.

Contrary to popular belief, the department gets more calls on Mondays and Tuesdays than it gets on Saturdays and Sundays.

That’s because, due to commuters and full workplaces, there are more people in the area the department covers on weekdays than during the weekends.

The department covers De Pere, Lawrence, Ledgeview and 10% of Ashwaubenon, an area of some 45,000 people. Its crews responded to 1,840 advanced life support calls, and 1,080 basic life support calls last year. It transported 1,876 people to hospitals and responded to 1,046 calls that didn’t result in a trip to the hospital.

Sometimes calls overlap, with up to eight people calling at the same time, usually during storms. Nearly 400 times last year, the department had two calls overlapping; 121 times, it had three calls overlapping; 47 times, it had four calls overlapping; 19 times, it had five calls overlapping; 10 times, it had six calls overlapping; four times, it had seven calls overlapping; and five times, it had eight calls overlapping.

The department had to call its crews in for help on their off hours 418 times last year, and 40% of the time, only one crew member was available and able to help.

That’s not optimal, the chief admitted, but they’re looking at ways to entice people to come in on their off hours.

“Our duty-crew system is not working the way it was set up to work years ago,” Jansen said. “A lot of our younger staff just are busy on their off days and they don’t like overtime. So, they aren’t coming in like a lot of the dedicated staff did 10 years ago, so we’re trying to work through that problem, really look at that and really evaluate it.”

Currently, off-duty crews who get called in to duty for overtime get paid for three hours for every hour they work on a duty-crew call.

The city had $1,030,125 worth of total fire losses in 2025.

The Common Council gave the green light to De Pere and the Town of Lawrence signing a memorandum of understanding to enhance collaboration on emergency medical services in conjunction with their current EMS contract.
Both sides benefit from the MOU: it will allow cross-credentialing so that Town of Lawrence members who are certified as paramedic or emergency medical technicians can assist De Pere Fire Rescue ambulance on scene at their certification level.

It will also allow them to participate in EMS trainings through De Pere’s contract with the Aurora Baycare training center, as well as to purchase medical supplies that are used by their members in incidents.