Haz-Mat Cleanup Crews Plan to Unite : Safety: Teams from five fire departments prepare to join forces in an effort to provide quicker and more efficient response.

Pooling resources to save money and possibly lives, Ventura County’s fire departments plan to unify their hazardous-materials response crews into one toxin-fighting team.

Five departments now train and equip special crews to handle toxic spills and poisonous blazes: Ventura County, the cities of Ventura and Oxnard, Point Mugu and the Seabee base in Port Hueneme.

Under a plan set to be signed early next month, the county Fire Department would drop one of its two nine-man crews, and the other departments would drop the formal boundaries that now define their coverage areas.

That way, when toxic chemicals leak into the air or water, dispatchers would send hazardous-materials crews from the two nearest departments automatically, said Ventura County Assistant Fire Chief Bob Roper.

In the past, each department had to ask formally for mutual aid from other departments--which then could refuse if their own hazardous-materials crews were tied up.

And the county’s Moorpark-based haz-mat team, as it is called, had to cover toxic spills in all the cities, including far-flung Ojai.

Under the new plan, a spill anywhere in the county would be handled by the nearest crew, Roper said.

For instance, if there was a toxic spill in Santa Paula and the county crew in Moorpark was busy, Ventura’s crew would cover it, Roper said.

And if Oxnard had a haz-mat spill, it would send out its own crew and another would be radio-dispatched from the county department, said Oxnard Fire Chief Randy Coggan.

“I think it’s way past due,” Coggan said. “I think the departments for too long have tried to do too much on their own.

“And as everybody’s budget gets tighter or we need to provide more services, this is one way we can do it,” he added. “The whole purpose of this is to provide a better level of service to the taxpayers.”

The plan also would improve response time and efficiency, said Capt. Gary Surad of the 78-member civilian fire department at the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center.

And it could save money. The Ventura County Fire Department’s two haz-mat crews would become one, dropping from 18 firefighters to nine--without layoffs.

Currently, the 18 firefighters work in shifts--three per crew, two crews per shift, three shifts per day. The county would cut nine now-empty openings and transfer nine of the haz-mat firefighters to other duty, said Abbe Cohen, department fiscal manager.

That, she figures, would save county taxpayers $880,000 a year--nearly half the county budget for haz-mat operations.

Other departments would not cut positions, but they could save money on training, said Ventura Deputy Fire Marshal Brian Clark.

Ventura could save about $39,000 a year that it now spends to keep 60 of its 80 firefighters trained in toxic decontamination--the dangerous task of scrubbing down white-suited haz-mat technicians who have been exposed to poisons, Clark said.

“We’d eliminate that need because we’d have the other departments responding along with us,” he said.

“What we’re going to do is set it up so that no one department has to assume a stand-alone haz-mat response,” he said.

“It’s very labor-intensive during an actual incident,” Clark said. “For instance, a spill of a couple hundred gallons of an acid would require--in our response--about 12 people that are [highly] trained. It’s difficult for a department of our size.”

Linda Wadley, spokeswoman for the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme, said, “This kind of thing would be a real benefit in a large-scale response to a haz-mat emergency, or if you have several haz-mat emergencies at once.”