Bend fire officials say it will cost about another $1 million to provide adequate firefighting services if the city permits six- or seven-story buildings in downtown Bend.

Don Jenson, operations chief of the Bend Fire Department, said that if a number of tall buildings are allowed in the downtown area, his department will need a specialized crew to work a ladder truck needed to fight high-rise fires.

The fire department budget is now about $11.8 million.

He said his department would need an additional 14 people to cover three shifts and put a new truck company on the street.

”Any time you go up with multiple floors, it is more personnel-intensive,” Jenson said. ”It takes a lot of people to get the equipment up there, you are using self-contained breathing apparatus and you have to rotate those people and those resources.”

Last fall, Bend city councilors raised maximum building heights downtown, allowing for 70-foot-tall buildings on the east side.

Construction can go even higher if special permits are obtained.

While downtown Bend doesn’t have such a building now, a developer has submitted a land-use application with the city planning department to build a 70-foot, seven-story hotel there.

Councilors now say increasing height restrictions may have been a mistake and said at a meeting on Monday that they plan to revisit the decision.

When the council considered the change in September, Bend fire officials said managing a fire or rescue operation in a 70-foot-tall building would require additional staff, training and equipment, according to a meeting summary. Councilors were told that, as building heights downtown increase, a dedicated crew would be necessary to serve them.

Jenson said none of his department’s employees have been trained to fight these types of fires, because it simply hasn’t been an issue.

Bill Boos, president of the Bend Firefighters Association, said the fire department’s training budget would likely increase if taller buildings are built.

Crews would either be sent to larger cities for training or trainers would need to be brought in to educate firefighters about the different methods employed in fighting a high-rise fire, he said.

”When you look at a normal structure like a house, you are at ground level,” Boos said. ”In this case, you are going to be on the ground and all the tools and the water lines are going to have to be taken up into the building.”

Jenson said crews may use an override feature on elevators to assist them in this task, but generally do not because of safety concerns.

The elevator circuits on the floor where the fire is burning tend to get burned out.

Typically, Jenson said, with a seven-story building or higher, the fire burns out quickly where elevator circuits are located. ”This causes the elevator to go to the fire floor, and that’s why a lot of people using elevators during a fire end up dying.”

He said the favored access point in taller buildings is the stairwell, where waterlines are usually located, allowing crews to tap in.

But, he said, sending multiple crews into the stairwell of a high-rise has its own risks.

”The key issue is that it’s very manpower-intensive to fight those fires,” he said. ”It’s an extreme example, but think of the twin towers. What the fire department was doing was sending person after person after person to bring those people down, and when you look at increasing the heights of buildings then it’s going to create a need for more manpower.”

The Land Use and Transportation Committee of the Bend City Council will meet in September to further discuss building height issues.