Duluth Fire Department 2022 summary report

Today, Wednesday April 19^th, Mayor Emily Larson and DFD Chief Shawn Krizaj held a news conference to provide a 2022 year-end summary report.

“Onboarding people and adding expanded opportunities for younger firefighters is something that we take seriously, and we really want to move that forward. And then although we continue to be the third busiest fire department in the state behind only Minneapolis and Saint Paul, 2022 is the first year that we actually eclipsed 15,000 runs in a year,” said DFD Chief Shawn Krizaj.

Training is also high on the minds of the DFD as they hired 22 new people last year. However, what is one of the biggest challenges the DFD is faced with?

“One of our biggest challenges still is recruitment and retention. As we bring new people on, we get busier. We have different things, new things to do and keeping our people here. One of the things in the Minnesota Fire Service is we’re heavy volunteer state of our over 20,000 firefighters is almost 18 or 19,000 are volunteer departments. Historically, we’ve never been a stepping stone department. People came to Duluth Fire for a career. They came here and they worked here for 25 years, 30 years. And one of the challenges we’re seeing now is we’re bringing people in,” continued Krizaj.

However despite the challenge, DFD made clear, they are proud of their progress in 2022.

“What I’m the most proud of is just our people, our personnel. And that’s, again, in all of our divisions,” finished Krizaj.