L.A. Gets 1st Woman Fire Battalion Chief

That wasn’t noise from the City Hall earthquake repair project that was echoing through the Los Angeles Fire Department headquarters Tuesday as fire commissioners met the first woman battalion chief in city history.

“That’s the glass ceiling being broken!” exclaimed firefighter-paramedic Paige Matsumoto as newly named Battalion Chief Roxanne Bercik was greeted by officials and by 10 men who also were promoted to battalion chief.

Bercik, 39, will oversee firefighters from a half-dozen South-Central fire stations in her new job.

“We’re changing from a very traditional fire service where there weren’t any women to a very nontraditional one,” said Bercik, a Long Beach resident. “We’re definitely progressing.”

That change hasn’t come easily for the Fire Department.

The city was put under a court order in 1974 to aggressively recruit women and minorities. But concerns that the department has discriminated against women in particular have swirled through the 2,952-firefighter department since 1994.

That’s when a harshly worded city audit concluded that 40% of female recruits from the seven previous years had washed out of the department training academy--a dropout rate twice that of male recruits.

That is also when the existence of a “bloopers-like” videotape of female recruits making such mistakes as dropping ladders on themselves surfaced to embarrass high-ranking department administrators.

The controversy helped prompt the resignation of longtime Fire Chief Donald Manning in 1995.

As recently as 20 months ago, the department was depicted in a report by an independent consultant as rife with problems caused by an old boys network that locked women and minorities out of top posts.

But those days are over, Fire Chief William Bamattre said Tuesday as he introduced Bercik and the other new battalion chiefs. The new chiefs also include three Latinos, an African American and an Asian American.

“This group collectively represents the direction I want to take the department,” Bamattre said. “It’s certainly something we need to take notice of because other people will take notice of it.”

City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, whose Personnel Committee staged a series of hearings when allegations of discrimination in the Fire Department surfaced, praised the promotions.

“This is a long time coming,” Commissioner Larry Gonzalez told the new battalion chiefs. “I hope diversity is in the minds of you all as you proceed to train others to take your position down the road.”

Promoted along with Bercik were Daryl Arbuthnott, Robert Franco, Raymundo Gomez, Wolfgang Knabe, Douglas Graft, Louis Roupoli, John Stilson, Thomas Burau, Michael Bowman and Christopher Kawai.

Bercik said she joined the fire department 14 years ago as its “fifth or sixth” female firefighter.

These days there are 86 women in firefighting jobs--including three engineers and three captains.

Bercik has spent the last eight years as a captain, which put her in charge of a small number of male firefighters. She said she does not anticipate any difficulty having a larger group of males follow her orders as a battalion chief.

But she acknowledged, “there’s always people who aren’t exactly proactive” in having women in the fire station. “They don’t think women should be firefighters.”