Photos by Tony Picciolo
1:02pm Reporting by Greggory Moore | On September 7, a fire at Whaler’s Run, a large condominium complex situated on Daisy Avenue and bordered by 6th and 7th Streets, caused over $100,000 worth of damage and displaced eight people.
In one respect, though, the residents of Whaler’s Run may have been lucky concerning the timing of the fire. “If the cuts go into effect [as they are proposed currently],” says Tony Picciolo, president of the Whaler’s Run Homeowners Association, “more of this building would have been burned down, without a doubt.”
Picciolo met with firefighters at the time of the fire and was allowed on-site to aid them with the property’s layout. He considers their response “very impressive,” but fears that next time he and his fellow residents will not be able to receive such aid, thanks to the cuts to the fire department being proposed in ongoing negotiations with the City related to the implementation of cutbacks in the 2012 city budget.
Deputy Fire Chief Jeff Reeb says that for a fire at this particular location, the response may not be diminished. “If we were to go off what was proposed in the budget book, [that address] wouldn’t be impacted by the service reduction,” he says.
Reeb explains, though, that this is a projection based on all units being at their stations when the call came in — which is often not the way things play out in real life.
“There’s always factors that influence unit availability,” Reeb says. “Any one of those units — or more than one — can be on a response when a structure fire comes in. So then you reach out to the next-closest unit. So there are a lot of variables. … The question doesn’t lend itself to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer because of the way we manage resources.”
As an example, Reeb says that resources may get temporarily repositioned based on call volume. “We’re constantly moving resources to fill holes in coverage,” he says. “We’re constantly moving the chess pieces around on the board. A chessboard is a pretty good analogy. When the game starts and you have a full set of pieces, you’re in a better position than when some of the pieces are missing. Budget reductions have us take pieces off the board, and our total capability goes down.”
This concerns Picciolo enough so that he felt impelled to call his councilmember, Robert Garcia, to express his concern over the extra damage he feels a fire such as the one at Whaler’s Run will cause if the proposed reductions go through.
Reeb notes that at this point it is unclear just what the reductions will be. “Because the city council continues to be negotiating with the Firefighters Association,” he says, “we do not yet have a final disposition on what the annual budget reduction number, and therefore the level of service reduction.”
But regarding one proposed reduction, namely, fire engine crews being downsized from four people to three, Reeb states what may seem obvious: “[An engine] has a greater capability to do things if it has four firefighters on it than if it has three firefighters.”
