BALTIMORE (AP) -- The Baltimore City Fire Department could go from a small list of job candidates lacking in diversity to having too many qualified minorities.
After announcing last month that it would hire 50 firefighters in October, the Fire Department expects more than 2,200 people will take its entrance exam Saturday morning. Most of them will be minorities.
``From crisis comes opportunity,'' said Fire Chief William Goodwin, who was criticized in April by Mayor Martin O'Malley when it was learned that Goodwin had hired the agency's first all-white class of recruits since the department integrated in 1953.
The class of 30 men and women was appointed in February. They are expected to graduate from the fire academy in September. The class was the second to be selected from a candidate list that was more than a year old and did not have the names of any qualified minorities remaining on it.
After The (Baltimore) Sun reported the diversity troubles within the Fire Department's class of recruits, O'Malley and Goodwin announced changes in how the agency would hire people - which included a new round of testing.
But with relatively few jobs available, fire officials are concerned they will have too many strong candidates waiting on a hiring list and losing interest.
The 2,200 people who have turned in applications to become eligible to test Saturday are more than double the number who took the test in 2002, the last time an entrance exam was offered, and officials say it might be the largest group attracted by the Fire Department in a decade.
Declining to offer specific figures, Goodwin also suggested that minorities will far outnumber whites taking the test - which should yield a more diverse hiring pool down the line, he said.
The African-American population in Baltimore is about 67 percent, while about 25 percent of the Fire Department's 1,600 workers are black. Goodwin also said he hopes to increase other minority populations within the department, such as Hispanics.
