In Long Beach, sometimes there just aren’t enough ambulances to go around.
By mid-morning Wednesday, paramedics Dave Meistrell and Danny Sanchez had answered two calls: an 87-year-old Los Altos man who fell and then a cyclist struck by a car near Carson Park. With Meistrell behind the ambulance’s wheel, Sanchez kept conversation with the cyclist in the back.
Minutes after dropping him off and leaving the hospital, the wary crew mentioned lunch, turkey burgers and chips, but then another call came in from dispatch. Meistrell flipped the siren switch and ran a red light.
On an average day, the two should expect 16 to 30-odd calls in their 24-hour shift. At that pace, paramedics are on the move most of the day and night, skipping meals and taking their coffee to go.
It’s a symptom of increasing 911 calls in Long Beach — nearly double since Meistrell and Sanchez joined the Long Beach Fire Department two decades ago, according to numbers tracked by their union. Department staffing, meanwhile, has remained stagnant, bringing the LBFD’s emergency care to what rank-and-file paramedics say is one of its most difficult points in its history.
The situation has catalyzed talks on how to curtail a crisis among sworn firefighters that union leaders say is leading to burnout among its younger crews and attrition by its veterans to other departments.
Out of Long Beach’s 23 fire stations, the city has nine advanced life support ambulances, meant to cover the entire city 24 hours a day. In 2014, city paramedics responded to about 49,000 calls. “Ten years later, we’re at 58,000 now,” said Long Beach Fire Chief Dennis Buchanan.
In 2023, department records show 167 instances where all nine units were unavailable for at least five minutes.
When that happens, Buchanan explained, the city must rely on paramedic teams in neighboring Cerritos, Lakewood and Seal Beach.
Discussions have swirled for months around one option: the restoration and possible expansion of Long Beach Rescue 2, an ambulance crew established in January 2024 using one-time funds.
Rescue 2 acts as a relief unit in the busiest parts of the city from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., when calls are heaviest.
In its first year, it handled nearly 3,000 calls, focused largely on where they’re most concentrated — Downtown, Midtown, Belmont and Alamitos Beach neighborhoods. And the number of instances where units were unavailable dropped to 42.
But the team was reduced to part-time — from seven days to three — after it became clear it wouldn’t have enough funding to finish the year.
In response, paramedics on Tuesday aired complaints to the City Council that they are once again overwhelmed with 911 calls on a daily basis. Some shared stories of people who died because there wasn’t a crew available in time.
“I’ve seen the call volume for some paramedics more than double, and I’ve seen staffing levels reduced,” said Tim Isaacson, a paramedic of 15 years with LBFD. “I’ve also seen over the last few years that we, the LBFD, have no longer been able to cover the runload in our city. Never before can I remember relying on our neighboring cities to cover our workload. We regularly need to ask for help from other agencies to do what we used to do so well on our own.”
Asking Buchanan Tuesday if the department runs out of units, Councilwoman Cindy Allen answered her own question: “I do know that we did, Chief. And we ran out of units yesterday. And this is happening all the time. It’s almost on a daily basis that we run out of rescue (ambulances).”
In his report, Buchanan said it would cost about $419,000 to restore the Rescue 2 team to its seven-day schedule. But he admitted that alone may not solve the problem.
In response to the questioning of Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, Buchanan acknowledged that given the call volume and response times, he doesn’t “think one ALS unit is sufficient.”
“For the size and the city of Long Beach, at a minimum I think we need to start looking at eleven (total) paramedic ALS units twenty-four-seven,” Buchanan said.
Lamont Nguyen, president of the Long Beach Firefighters Association, estimates the department needs a dozen ambulance teams to be permanently funded 24 hours a day just to match the paramedic-to-person ratio in the city of Los Angeles.
“Twelve rescues would still fall short of being always prepared but would (surely) be far better capabilities than what we are offering citizens now,” he said.
In the city of Los Angeles, Nguyen said there is about one ALS ambulance per every 42,553 people. In Long Beach, it is one per every 55,555 people — more than double the national average, according to the union.
Meanwhile, the city has not budgeted for more emergency care staff in more than 20 years, Nguyen said. Following a hiring freeze in 2008, the department lost dozens of sworn officers between 2010 and 2013, some of whom were never restored.
Sanchez was with the Rescue 2 ambulance in its first 10 months. It was a bummer when its hours were cut, he said.
Currently, paramedics work 72 hours of mandatory overtime a month. In some cases, that means personnel can end up on the job for as long as 96 hours straight — with proper approval — sometimes with little or no sleep, according to the union and a department spokesperson.
“Basically working two fireman jobs,” Meistrell said. “And that goes over like a fart in a church with the wife and kids.”
Paramedics described it as a grueling, around-the-clock job with no room for error. It’s a kind of work that demands a fraternal bond among its platoons, where initiative is necessity, idleness is scorned, sick days are rare and dinner plans are forfeited. The ones who make it, they say, are those with an unwavering eagerness to help, regardless of the hour, and an unwillingness to let others down.
“Unless you’re in the hospital or something tragic happened to you, you’re here when you’re sick,” Sanchez said.
The two say a lot of the younger paramedics are already exhibiting signs of burnout a result of the daily workload.
“I’ve noticed in the last four or five years, we’ve had a very big influx of enthusiastic, younger guys that are not angry at the world,” Meistrell said. “An influx of ‘get it done, right,’ and unfortunately, this whole situation, yes, it wears on them.”
According to Nguyen, 20 to 30 people have left in the past nine years for easier, slower fire departments elsewhere, creating a “crisis of inexperience.”
“Long Beach Fire Department was, for generations, a destination department for firefighters and paramedics,” he continued. “We have now sort of become a stepping stone. … There are more seeking employment elsewhere at this very moment. We are hemorrhaging employees.”
The department has responded by doubling down on recruitment. The LBFD has 50 people currently in its fire academy.
On Tuesday, City Manager Tom Modica said while he feels confident he can find more money for Rescue 2, it doesn’t mean “we’re going to like all the solutions.”
Expanding Rescue 2 to seven days a week on a 12-hour schedule in 2025 would cost about $419,840 for the rest of the current fiscal year, and $1.23 million next year.
Establishing it as a 24-hour schedule next year, however, would cost $2 million, potentially paid for by local sales tax, some of the $2.3 million year-end surplus or money pulled from another department.
This comes as the city faces a $61 million structural deficit over the next few years. City officials said they will come back later this month with potential ways to pay for it as part of the 2026 budget process.
“This is the tough decision the council has to make whenever we look at budget requests, is where do the dollars come from,” Modica said.
“It is a zero-sum game,” he said. “We need to go back and do some hard work to see what we are going to defund or deprioritize in order to prioritize.”
Elected officials were a bit more optimistic, however.
Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson mentioned the November 2024 passage of Measure LB — a tax on the city’s two power plants expected to yield $15 million annually — the recently passed L.A. County Measure A sales tax and the newly scheduled city sales tax, which would bring in an additional $26 million annually.
“I welcome a pivot to focusing on modernizing our department and our response to meet what the data tells us is the most growing demand,” Richardson said.
Councilmember Roberto Uranga, who sits on the budget oversight committee, assured union members in the room that they “will look at this very, very carefully” in budget negotiations.
“Because the services you provide to our City Council members, to our community is very important if not the most important as a city government,” he said, adding: “If it were not for you guys, I wouldn’t be here.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated to remove an inaccurate statement that Rescue 2 was previously cut completely, clarify that 96-hour shifts only happen in some specific cases and remove an erroneous reference that county tax dollars could be used to fund Rescue 2.