Los Angeles Firefighters Overworked, Report Says

The city of Los Angeles has a fire problem.

Fire department employees are overworked. While they might appreciate the overtime pay, it’s a dangerous situation.

On May 31, the L.A. Fire Department sent the Board of Fire Commissioners a report prepared by Citygate Associates, LLC. The report, called a Standards of Cover (SOC) analysis, reviewed “the adequacy of the existing deployment system of apparatus and personnel,” including the “workload per response unit.” The study focused on “neighborhood-based fire and emergency medical services resources.”

The analysis found that “the volume and simultaneous demand on the top 10 to top 28 LAFD stations is the highest Citygate has ever measured in a metro client.”

Reading between the lines of the 65-page report, the cause of the problem becomes clear. “Challenge #1” is “high-volume EMS incident demand.”

Too many emergency medical services personnel are working “for long, consecutive hours at a time.” The scale of the crisis can be glimpsed in one startling number: 392,949.

LAFD responded to 392,949 EMS incidents, some of which had more than one patient, in 2020 alone. “It is not an exaggeration to say the LAFD sees almost half a million patients per year,” the analysts wrote.

For comparison, the busiest emergency room in the United States in 2020 was Parkland Health and Hospital in Dallas, Texas. It saw 210,152 patients.

Locally, Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center saw 136,161 emergency patients in 2020.

The cause of the huge volume of emergency medical calls isn’t precisely identified by the Citygate analysts, but an educated guess can be ventured based on one of the report’s recommendations.

“Not all these incidents require traditional emergency medical skills,” the analysts wrote. “Over the course of late 2021 and into 2022, the City and County rolled out a pilot project for the delivery of alternative, non-urgent patient care—including mental health and homeless program diversion; however, this is not enough. The alternative response program needs to scale massively and quickly to lower the workload placed on fire units back down to moderate and serious emergencies.”

As an example, the Citygate analysts mentioned the volume of calls answered in 2020 by Fire Station 9 in the east downtown area. Fire Station 9 responded to 18,986 incidents, an average of 52 per day. That’s one every 30 minutes.

By doing the math for the busiest stations, the analysts concluded that “well over 100 new non-firefighter personnel must be hired and trained for alternative response measures to meet the service needs of the City.”

It sounds like the Los Angeles Fire Department is being dangerously overworked as a result of the homelessness crisis, or more specifically, the government’s decision to allow homeless encampments to remain on the street until there are enough $500,000 permanent supportive housing units for all the unhoused residents who are camping on a public right-of-way.

“Outside of the traditional 24-hour fire service staffing model, where in America do critical health care professionals, airline pilots, or railroad engineers perform critical work well past 12 consecutive hours without a mandated rest break?” the Citygate analysts asked. “Citygate does not believe the LAFD can wait years for an alternative response program to be established, during which time EMS incident volume will likely further increase.”

Firefighters earn a lot of overtime pay. How much of that is due to the consequences of having sprawling homeless encampments everywhere in the city?

In June 2021, the LAFD said fires related to homelessness had tripled in three years and were occurring at the rate of about 24 per day. CBS Los Angeles reported at that time that 54% of the fires responded to by LAFD in previous weeks had been caused by people experiencing homelessness, and in the downtown L.A. area, it was 80%.

Opinions may vary on whether non-firefighters should respond to emergency calls, but we certainly should consider re-prioritizing some of the state and local funds intended to address homelessness so that the budgets of fire departments are fully funded.

The first thing that’s needed is a complete accounting of how much of the fire department’s workload is directly attributable to homeless encampments. Let’s work on that.

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