DAPHNE — At last Wednesday’s public safety committee meeting, Fire Chief James White announced that the fire department had retained its level 4 fire insurance rating.

The Insurance Service Office, or ISO, is the organization which inspects and ranks the nation’s fire departments for insurance companies. Fire departments are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being the best. The lower a fire department’s ranking, the more savings citizens can hope to see on their property insurance rates, for both residential and commercial insurance.

In the past, the surveys were done once every 10 years. White said that is changing now and the ISO will start inspecting once every five to seven years. The city has held a class 4 ISO rating since the last inspection.

“We work extremely hard,” White said. “We are excited to have retained the class 4 rating. We were afraid the construction on Highway 181 might have hurt our rating, but having agreements with other local fire departments for first responding and the prospect of a new fire station being built helped us out. We still have some things to work on though before our next inspection in roughly five years.”

For the month of August, the fire department responded to 207 calls, with 146 of those calls being Emergency Medical Service (EMS) or rescue calls. There was one commercial fire and three residential fires the department responded to in that month, according to data provided by the fire department.