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Study Says San Diego Needs 14 More Firehouses
SAN DIEGO - A new study says San Diego County needs at least 14 more fire stations and an extra $92 million to build them _ but it doesn't say where the money will come from.
The study also calls for consolidating some of the county's dozens of separate fire agencies and adding more firefighters in the backcountry. The study says about 1,600 firefighters, nearly half of them volunteers, handle about 263,000 incidents a year.
The study will be presented to county supervisors next week. It was commissioned after voters rejected a new tax to fund fire services in the wake of 2007 wildfires that burned 1,300 homes and killed two people.
San Diego city Fire Chief Javier Mainar says the city's known for years that it needs more stations but the problem is how to pay for it.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The study also calls for consolidating some of the county's dozens of separate fire agencies and adding more firefighters in the backcountry. The study says about 1,600 firefighters, nearly half of them volunteers, handle about 263,000 incidents a year.
The study will be presented to county supervisors next week. It was commissioned after voters rejected a new tax to fund fire services in the wake of 2007 wildfires that burned 1,300 homes and killed two people.
San Diego city Fire Chief Javier Mainar says the city's known for years that it needs more stations but the problem is how to pay for it.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Oldman on
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Jack Stouts plan (system status management) won't work too well on the fire side. Can you imagine running a ladder company from one end of the district to the other and back? ;}
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Permalink Reply by Jay Nicholson on
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Chief, your numbers may reflect an east coast/ west coast difference. My city runs two,3-man engine companies. From the current budget, each crew of 1 captain, 1 engineer and 1 FF/PM costs, in salary alone $16,564.13/mo. This is A step money. There is an E step. Multiple that by 3 crews(ABC shift) you get $49,692.39/mo. That is $596,308.68 in salary alone. The common figure when including benefits etc is a 1.56 multiplier. You now have $930,241.54 per engine per year in salary and benefits. SDFD runs 4-man engines. Add an extra FF to the mix and you get $1,210,765.79.(I don't have the exact #s for SDFD, but usually, the bigger city has a better salary package.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Que????
I'm not sure how comparing San Fransisco to San Diego is an East Coast/West Coast difference?
Could you please enlilghten me?
The $500,000 is a ballpark figure and it was based upon what I know from several cities from all over the country.
Regardless, if personnel costs are less per firefighter in SD than in SF, that's simply additional evidence that SD is understaffed and under-stationed.
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Ralph, there's a better answer than SSM. Put enough ambulances in the busy areas to handle the call volume and maintain decent response times without stripping the slower areas of coverage. If you use SSM anywhere that has rural areas, geographically-isolated areas, or pretty much anywhere that doesn't have a tight, densely-populated geographic area with lots of local hospital choices inside the response area, then it is not going to work all that well. Been there, done that.
SSM is an excuse for inadequate staffing and inadequate numbers of ambulances.
SSM is also based upon every day being an average day. When a worse-than-average day comes along, SSM comes up empty.
Been there, done that one, too.
Even some of the most pro SSM EMS folks I know - folks who seriously dislike Fire/EMS combination systems - will tell you that there's not any scientific or medical evidence to support SSM, Jack Stout's theories, or the 8 minute, 59 second response time that most SSM contracts have used as being equal to the old ACLS 8 minute response time standard.
It's a lot easier to show that FD response times should be 5 minutes or less to the 90th percentile, due to the exponential fire growth that can be demonstrated by the fire growth curve.
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Chief, I wasn't comparing SF with SD but was assuming(my bad) that your $500K came from your neck of the woods. As you can see, that figure is 2 to 2.5 times that $500K.
Understaffed and under-stationed are understatements. The population has double since the 70s but the dept has only increased by about 25%. There is plenty of blame to go around, mostly with the elected officials.
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Jay, check out Portland, OR, Clark County, NV, or Santa FE, NM for approximate costs for one company. They were around $500K the last time I checked.
Regardless, the fiscal crisis is approximately equal in all parts of CA. Any comparison of SF to SD makes it pretty obvious how far behind SD is on their standard of coverage.
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