Danger Is Always Part of the Job at One of City’s Busiest Fire Stations

When Ralph Haynes was 3 years old, his house burned to the ground the day after Christmas. Ever since, he says, he has wanted to put out fires.

Now 34, Haynes is a captain with the San Diego Fire Department at Station 12 in East San Diego, the second busiest station in the city and the first to request bulletproof vests because of the numbers of shootings and stabbings in its district.

The station, at Imperial Avenue and Ozark Street, receives an average of about 15 calls a day, ranging from heart attacks and structure fires to fuel spills and false alarms, firefighters say. But occasionally, there is that rare, slow day when they can relax.

On one 24-hour shift last week, there were only three calls in which firefighters actually had to extinguish flames. It was an atypical shift, but to most it provided welcome relief.

“This is great,” said Firefighter Bill Nelson over a pasta salad lunch that day. “It’s kind of nice. We haven’t slept more than three hours (at a stretch) in over two months. We just haven’t had a break.”

Last year, Station 12 answered more than 4,500 calls, most of them requests for medical aid. But most calls last Wednesday were either canceled or handled by paramedics who arrived at the scene first.

The day began for the station’s eight firefighters, two paramedics and Battalion Chief Craig Black with an 8 a.m. meeting. Coffee brewed as Capt. Bill Bagnell ran through a schedule for the 24-hour shift, including a training video presentation at 3 p.m. and truck evaluations the next day.

Tacos for Dinner

Lunch and dinner money dropped noisily into a metal box as Firefighter Ron Calkins, the unofficial station cook, announced tacos for dinner.

Calkins and Engineer Russ Steppe then tested equipment as part of their daily chores. They topped off the gasoline in chain saws and practiced starting up the Jaws of Life, a hydraulic compression tool often used for cutting tops off cars to free people trapped inside.

“We get it just the way we like it. It’s real important that this doesn’t break down on you,” Calkins said. “And you want to be able to start equipment up when it’s pitch black outside.”

Next came a “code 9” or mandatory exercise in nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park on Skyline Drive. Dropping dark blue uniform trousers to reveal official SDFD running shorts, pairs of matching firefighters walked around the park. Some ran a few laps.

At 11 a.m., the park was empty. But the place would be teeming at night. “This is an unusual neighborhood. You can be out at 2 in the morning, and it looks like 3 in the afternoon there are so many people,” Bagnell said.

Haynes looked around him before a brief jog. “I live in this area. My church is in this area. . . . I like the activity. We saved a guy’s house the other day and he was affiliated with my church.”

The entire neighborhood was visible when Bagnell and Calkins tested the fire truck’s elevating platform, sometimes called the snorkel. The two of them were carried 70 feet in the air in a matter of seconds in a basket used for rescues and dumping water onto flames.

An hour later, the firefighters split up, those with the engine, also known as the pump, off to practice drills; the others headed for Ralphs.

Although there were only three things on Calkins’ list--Diet Slice, bottled water and oranges--he left the supermarket with $52.45 worth of food. One by one, tortillas, onions, oranges, lettuce, mushrooms, avocados and tomatoes were placed in the cart.

Somewhere between the milk and bagels, William Erhard Jr., 4, came up to Bagnell with an outstretched hand. “He wants to be a firefighter when he grows up,” his mother confided.

Sketchy Details

At the station, Calkins dished up a massive bowl of pasta salad and garlic bread. The men settled down in the TV room to eat. At 12:43 p.m. came the first call of the day. A fuel spill on Interstate 805, north of Market.

Firefighters are notoriously fast eaters, said Nelson, as he wolfed down garlic bread, because their meals are interrupted so often.

Sketchy details of the spill were transmitted first over a pager system and on a ticker-tape machine mounted in the garage, then over a loudspeaker. The firefighters suited up quickly but without any appearance of urgency, as if they had done so hundreds of times before. Bagnell checked the wall map for the fastest route.

Sirens blared so loudly that the firefighters wore earphones against the noise. The speedometer read about 45 to 50 m.p.h. as the engine rolled.

The fuel spill turned out to be a badly smashed, abandoned BMW by the side of the road. Fuel was not leaking and there were no injuries. Paramedics at the scene said a man was seen running from the car over a nearby hill, and firefighters suspected the brand-new car was stolen.

Scarcely was the engine back at Imperial and Ozark when Nelson spotted a grass fire. Both the engine and the truck responded, but the fire turned out to be minor and was quickly controlled. “That was easy,” said Engineer Dan Goebel.

For Goebel, the work is truly in his blood. His uncle came on the department in 1929 and stayed for 43 years. His brother went through the first stage of fire academy with him. And his cousin is now a battalion chief.

Steppe, who came on in 1982, remembered wanting to be a firefighter so badly that he slept outside the academy for four nights when registration lines began forming early that year.

Quiet Afternoon

Since then, Steppe said, he had been on almost every kind of call, ranging from the proverbial cat in the tree to a woman stuck in her bathtub.

One woman who lives about seven blocks south of the station has called the Fire Department 23 times in two months, mostly with medical complaints. Her address and a running tally were on a blackboard in the TV room and the firefighters know her so well they call her by her first name.

After the grass fire, the afternoon was quiet. On slow days like this, said Bagnell, the men usually conduct business inspections for fire violations or canyon rim inspections, or drive around getting to know their district.

“They still have a full day of work out for them. It’s no more playing checkers in the station.”

Getting to know the district means knowing where every fire hydrant is and knowing on which side of any given street the odd-numbered houses are, Goebel said. “This time of day, is the traffic bad? Can I make the turn on this alley? There’s one hill where, if you don’t go fast enough, you can’t make it up the next one.”

After the grass fire there were eight more calls, but most were minor. A “medical unknown,” or body reported to be on the street, turned out to be a man sleeping on the sidewalk. In two other cases, a boy who fell from his skateboard and a woman who had difficulty breathing were treated by paramedics already at the scene.

Shortly after midnight, however, the CHP reported a car fire on eastbound California 94. The firefighters used a hand fire extinguisher to put out the flames. Forty minutes later there was another car fire, this one “fully involved,” and putting it out required all 500 gallons of water in the engine. Haynes suspected the car was stolen and the fire set deliberately.

Most of the time, Bagnell said, “we never sleep all night. If you get to sleep four or five straight hours, that is an excellent night.”

Bagnell said gang activity in the area spurred him to request bulletproof vests about six months ago. Most of the gangs members were merely “wanna-be’s” who fought over drugs, not turf, he said. “Almost all the shootings we go to are gang-related. When I was pushing to get ballistic body armor, at the time, there was an average of six to eight shootings a month,” he said.

The vests are donned at the discretion of the captain. When a call is identified as a medical unknown, often it is a stabbing or shooting victim and firefighters will put their vests on as they wait about a block from the scene for a go-ahead from the Police Department.

Gang Activity

“We’ve had them for about six months,” said Bagnell. “There’s certain areas of the district where we put them on automatically, where there (are gangs) or something.” Late night calls to unknown areas also trigger the order to wear the vests.

Only three stations--12, 17 and 19--have the vests, but the department is considering ordering them for all firefighters, Chief John Hale said.

“When somebody calls in to 911 and says there’s been a car accident, there’s been stabbing, there’s been a shooting, there’s a fight going on, the first thing they do is call the Fire Department.” Firefighters are often the first ones there, Hale said. “Statistics show we had more shootings and stabbings and those types of activities, and our employees had been there frequently before the situation was under control,” so the firefighters were provided with the vests, said Hale.

The activity, and the many calls at Station 12 can take their toll. “If you lived every tragedy that you go to as a firefighter, you’d be crazy in a month,” Bagnell said.

To prevent this, the San Diego Fire Department has contracted with Sharp Memorial Hospital for a team of counselors--known as the critical incidents stress debriefing team--who are available if firefighters want to talk about a particularly bad call.

“I was with a firefighter one time, an excellent firefighter, and a female bicyclist had been run over by a trash truck. He came up and said, ‘I can’t handle this one,’ ” Bagnell said. “Those kind of calls you get a big lump in your throat. Everybody has a different level of stress.”

The toughest thing, according to Steppe, is to see a fire go bad. “To watch guys rushing to get out, the emotions of knowing someone’s trapped inside . . . or when something happens to a fellow firefighter. We’re usually out there helping people, and to be on the other end receiving help is kind of traumatic.”