O.C. Fire Volunteers May Get New Role

In what could lead to a major overhaul of a decades-old volunteer firefighting program, the staff of the Orange County Fire Authority will recommend to the board today that most volunteers no longer fight fires and only provide emergency medical service.

Scott Brown, a Fire Authority spokesman, said the board also will be urged to close two of the county’s 62 fire stations.

“The bottom line is that we need to build a program that is more accessible, more reliable and more sustainable into the future,” Brown said. “At the end of the day, people in Orange County will be better served: We’re not taking anything away, we’re making it better.”

After hearing the recommendations at a workshop this afternoon, Brown said, the board is expected to take action on them at its March 28 meeting. If the proposals are adopted, he said, “I would anticipate we would move fairly quickly--as early as April.”Though some volunteers expressed concerns, many said the proposal has merit.

Chad Selk, 31, a volunteer firefighter at Orange’s Station 1 for seven years, said Tuesday that he is “bummed” that the station would close under the plan and that he would miss fighting fires. “You ask anyone in the reserve program--that’s what they signed up for,” he said.

But he said the change could prove beneficial in the long run. “I kind of knew it was coming,” he said. “I’m more happy than anything that the department still has a desire for the reserves.”

The Fire Authority staff is proposing the change because the reserve program has been falling short on several counts in recent years, Brown said. The number of active volunteers, now 322, has been dwindling at a rate of 25% to 30% annually, and the reservists respond to only about half of the calls they receive.

“We do have some better response numbers at some stations,” Brown said, “but when you’re reviewing a program you have to look at it overall. And the truth is that we have not relied on the reserves to be a front-line component for the last couple of years.”

He attributed the declines to several demographic changes, including the fact that people tend to work farther away from their homes and communities than they once did, making it more difficult for them to reach fires at a moment’s notice.

Also, Brown said, the increasing amount of training required for urban firefighting makes it difficult for part-timers to keep up their skills.

“The demands of family and professional life have increased,” he said, “while the demands of the program make it very difficult for people to contribute their time.”

Under the staff’s proposal, most of the county’s reserve firefighters would stop fighting fires but would keep providing emergency medical support, which is about 70% of what they do now. The only exceptions would be those assigned to stations in Sunset Beach, Emerald Bay, Villa Park, Silverado Canyon and Modjeska Canyon. In those areas, Brown said, there is still a need for additional firefighting personnel.

To prepare for their new assignments, each volunteer would get about 100 hours of training leading to state certification as an emergency medical technician. As such, they would be capable of administering oxygen, controlling bleeding and opening air passages, performing CPR and defibrillation, and putting on splints.

“They offer the critical linkage in our chain of survival for those very early moments until the paramedics arrive,” Brown said.

The proposal calls for the closure of two stations: No. 12 in Cypress and No. 1 in Orange. Volunteer crews there would be reassigned.

A third station--either No. 29 or No. 30, both in Dana Point--would lose its volunteers, Brown said.

Bob Nied, 55, a reserve firefighter in Irvine, said of the plan: “It’s going to have an effect. We’ve operated a viable and well-qualified [fire] engine here for 17 years. Now I’m not sure where the program’s going or what’s going to happen.”

Colleague Tim Cronin, 57, agreed. “I signed up to part of the fire service,” said Cronin, who has been a volunteer in Irvine for 14 years. But he conceded that “things had to change, and this seems like the most logical direction.”