Fire Officials Nervously Oversee Cuts in Service : Public safety: Rainy day helps things go smoothly as ‘rolling brownouts’ are inaugurated. But fears remain that reduced staffing could take a tragic toll.

Capt. Bob Hoffman jumped up from his computer screen at the Los Angeles Fire Department dispatch center and shoved a fistful of colored magnets across a wall-sized map of the city’s fire stations, plugging a “hole” in fire coverage in the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s a light day, and I’m frightened right now,” acknowledged Hoffman, who was struggling--successfully, it should be noted--to coordinate the whereabouts of hundreds of engines, trucks and ambulances over a 464-square-mile city.

Virtually the entire Fire Department was on edge Monday as “rolling brownouts” went into effect around the city, slashing service at 13 fire stations and affecting virtually all of the city’s 105 stations in the most severe budget cutbacks in department history.

No major problems were reported Monday as a result of the $23.4-million cutbacks ordered by the Los Angeles City Council last month, and officials said the new system was working as well as could be expected--so far.

Under the new system, 13 fire stations at any given time will be down by either four or six members of their normal 10-person crews. Stations all over the city may be called to cover for stations that are “browned out” for rotating nine-day periods.

The cutbacks were supposed to have been implemented with the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, but were delayed a week after the Fire Department opposed starting the brownouts over the Fourth of July weekend, which is traditionally one of the worst for fires.

Astonishingly for July, it rained on Monday and dampened brushfire conditions that had been a problem over the weekend. But the rain didn’t calm fears.

“Everybody’s on edge,” said Chief Gerald Johnson, chief of staff for the Fire Department. “Everybody’s a notch up.”

Johnson and Chief Bill Bisson, who oversees the dispatch center, studied the wall-sized map of Los Angeles deep in a sub-basement of City Hall East, talking not about what had gone wrong--for nothing appeared to have gone wrong--but what might. What concerned them most was what they called a “collision of calls,” or major events taking place at the same time during the upcoming fire season.

Fire officials said they did not know of any dangerous delays in responses on the first day of the brownout. But, looking over a panel of dispatchers taking emergency medical calls, Johnson said, “There have to have been some delays.”

He said that during the next several days, the department will be studying the impact of the brownouts.

Fire captains around town expressed concerns that the ongoing brownouts could cause problems ranging from delays that could cost lives to injuries to firefighters exhausted from extra duty at browned-out stations.

In Station 98 in Pacoima, where firefighters responded Friday night to a house fire, somebody tacked up a newspaper article that said firefighters rescued two elderly people after pulling off bars affixed to windows.

Capt. Ed Villavicencio speculated that if the $150,000 blaze had happened during the brownout, the two victims might have died. “If we had been on the full brownout that time,” he said, “we probably would have had to wait for five minutes or so for another company to respond.”

During a brownout, the station has only two of its three firefighting crews on duty, Villavicencio said. Without the third unit, his firefighters normally would need to wait for a backup crew to arrive from another station before launching rescue operations, he said.

In Echo Park, Capt. Robert Munoa at Station 20 worried about how long it was going to take his companies to reach accident victims with the “jaws of life” device and about upcoming summer brush fires in Elysian Park.

Across from USC, Capt. Roy Prince at Station 15 expressed fears about response time if a major fire were to break out on campus when units already are deployed at other fires during Santa Ana wind conditions.

Paramedic service was also reduced to a rotating basis starting Monday night.