July 07--SAN BERNARDINO -- Fire Engine 230 roared toward a woman who'd overdosed, keeping lights and sirens on without a chance to return to the station from the crew's last call.
It was the seventh call for service Thursday for the station at Mill Street and Arrowhead Avenue, with more to come, after a night that included extricating people from a truck after a major crash on the 215 Freeway and a garage fire complicated by power that was re-routed because the house had been turned into a marijuana grow.
"Every day is something different," said firefighter/paramedic Hans Strebel, 32, leaning against the kitchen wall during a break in the action. "I came to this department because everything they train you to do, you get a chance to do. ... I don't like when bad things happen, but when they do I want to be the one who's there."
But soon, Strebel won't be coming to those calls from Station 10, which is also known by its county number, Station 230.
It's slated for closure, one of several big changes the City Council approved last week. Those changes cut the Fire Department budget by more than $2 million as part of $22 million in cuts citywide.
"I don't want to make cuts at all -- no department head does -- but these are the best adjustments we could make," Fire Chief Paul Drasil said.
The reductions -- including closing Station 10 and removing one unit from the station on E Street north of Highland Avenue -- are intended to be balanced by reducing the number of call-outs to 9-1-1 medical calls that aren't categorized as life-threatening.
To accomplish that, the department will hire three dispatch supervisors (and eliminate a dispatch manager, for a total increase of two) and route less-severe medical calls to the ambulance company AMR (American Medical Response).
At first, making that determination might add slightly to the time before emergency help is sent, but with training it should go down from where it is now, Drasil said.
"We're now just over two minutes," Drasil said, referring to the period from the time someone dials 9-1-1 to when firefighters or paramedics are sent. "We should be able to get that down considerably."
Talks are now underway with the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency to allow the department to stop responding to basic life support calls and instead route those to AMR.
When it comes to that part of the plan, the crew at Station 10 is supportive.
"We go to a lot of calls we don't need to that AMR could handle just as well, and we could respond better if we weren't spread so thin," said fire Capt. Steve Brown.
Some, Brown said, will inevitably be classified wrongly because callers sometimes wrongly claim symptoms in order to get a faster response or aren't aware of the extent of the problems faced by the person they're calling about. But he praised the overall ability of AMR paramedics, saying firefighters and AMR are both essential to each other's mission.
According to a report by Citygate Associates that Drasil used to make his recommended changes, Station 10 is the seventh-busiest of the city's 12 stations, with an average of 5.5 calls for service a day. All of its calls Thursday were medical, in line with the 80 percent average for the department over the last year.
Estimates vary on how many calls could be taken off the department's plate by returning to a priority dispatch system, but it could be as many as one-third, Drasil said.
Citygate's report says closing Station 10 and having neighboring stations respond instead would increase travel time by 20 seconds, the lowest of all the stations it studied in the city.
"I hope call time doesn't go up too much," Strebel said. "It's a big district."
Overall, the company at Station 10 says, they love their jobs, and they say they don't want to complain.
But they're worried, fearful that those at City Hall don't understand what they're going through.
"It's stressful," said Andrew Strebel, 37, Hans' brother. "They talk about how much we make, like we're greedy. It's average pay, we just work a lot of hours."
Firefighter and police wages are set as the average of 10 like-sized California cities. But overtime pay and benefits make the average compensation for the city's 40 top-paid firefighters $197,000 a year, the next 40 $166,000 and the next 40 $130,000, the city recently told the bankruptcy court. That accounts for most of a department that will go from 165 full-time positions (including non-firefighter positions like dispatchers and secretaries) to 148 under this budget.
Strebel is familiar with these numbers, and during the course of an afternoon he and others often referred to specific statements council members had made. He's also familiar, he said, with what's not reflected.
Andrew Strebel didn't plan to work the Fourth of July, for instance, but he received an email telling him he'd have to report for duty that day.
"We've all missed every holiday at least once," he said. "A lot of the overtime we work isn't necessarily voluntary."
And it sometimes shows up as an expense on city budgets even though some don't really cost taxpayers anything. For instance, Boeing hires firefighters -- often Strebel himself -- to stand by while it tests flights at San Bernardino International Airport, and firefighters sometimes help with large-scale fires outside the county. Those assignments show up as overtime, but they're fully reimbursed.
The city's budget shows it paid more than $4.8 million in overtime to firefighters in 2013-14, and plans to pay nearly $4.2 million in 2014-2015. That's nearly one-third of the total spent on firefighter salaries.
Drasil said he plans for the changes in his budget to take effect relatively soon, but they're out of his hands for now. The Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency must approve the dispatch change, and the city's personnel committee must approve many of the changes, which he says may include laying off two safety positions and demoting others.
The plan includes other components besides the cutbacks that got the most attention -- Drasil's outline and defense of them is four pages. And although the firefighters union joined some residents and Councilmen Benito Barrios and John Valdivia in opposing the cutbacks, Station 10 has some hope.
"Command staff (Drasil and the battalion chiefs, who designed the plan to fit the budget the city manager gave) have been where we are, so I think they know the reality," Brown said, carefully. "There's a lot we do that people wouldn't know because we're the ones you call when there's no one else to call. We'll see what happens. We'll keep showing up and working hard."
Copyright 2014 - San Bernardino County Sun, Calif.
