Fire Academy to Graduate 20 Men, 8 Women

Firefighting is a tough profession. Getting into the profession is even tougher, especially if you’re a woman.

But Ventura County Fire Department officials said they are trying to reverse the trend of a historically male-dominated profession.

For the first time in four years, the Ventura County Fire Department will graduate firefighters from its 34th Firefighting Academy on Friday night. The 28 rookies who will receive badges in a graduation ceremony were chosen from a pool of 1,000 applicants. Of those, eight are women. They will join the 45 other women already fighting fires for the county department.

The starting pay is about $30,000 annually. One of those graduating will go to work for the Camarillo State Hospital Fire Department.

The county department employs more than 400 firefighters and turnover is low, officials said.

“We just didn’t have any positions open,” department spokeswoman Sandi Wells said, explaining why fire academies are held so infrequently. “We finally had enough movement through retirement.”

The group they picked from piles of applications is ethnically diverse. Eight graduates are Latino, three are Asian, two are African American and one is a Native American, the department’s first.

“We are really trying to mirror the ethnic makeup of the community,” Wells said.

Slightly more than 80% of the department’s firefighters are white while 13.5% are Latino, 3% are Asian and 2.6% are African American.

The recruits will receive their badges during a ceremony scheduled for 7 tonight at the Westlake Hyatt Hotel. Before getting their badges, they spent 16 weeks lugging hoses, climbing ladders and fighting staged house fires. All survived a battery of written and physical tests just to qualify for the academy, Wells said.

In Oxnard and Ventura, the only two cities with their own fire departments, officials say they, too, are trying to mirror the community’s ethnic makeup when hirings occur. The problem is that so few openings occur.

“The last recruitment call we had was in 1988,” Oxnard Fire Capt. Steve Caplan said. Caplan’s department hired two new firefighters last year for the first time since 1988. Another five will be hired after a three-week academy starting next week. Because all five had previous experience, they do not need to attend a full-blown academy, Caplan said.

Two of those new hires are women, Caplan said, bringing to three the number of females in the department. Ventura has one female firefighter.

There, the Fire Department has hired only nine firefighters in the last two years--picked from a field of 2,200 people who attended a three-day recruitment program held at Ventura High School two years ago.

“We get a lot of calls about jobs, that’s for sure,” Ventura training chief Bill Riggsaid. He said the average firefighter stays on the job 20 years, making vacancies in the 82-member department rare. Both cities also cite budget restraints as another reason job openings rarely occur.

“Nobody’s building new stations or expanding,” Rigg said.

His department held an academy for three recruits hired in December. Because these 16-week academies are costly to run, the county’s three department’s are working out an arrangement to put on one academy for all while issuing one recruitment call.

“There is going to be a cooperative agreement,” Rigg said. “But nothing’s finalized yet.”