Burly men packed the room, arms folded across their barrel chests. There wasn’t enough space for them all. Hundreds spilled into overflow rooms.
Dangerous. Destined to fail. Deceitful. Horrific mistake.
One after another, firefighters and their union reps paraded to the microphone, trying to scare the bejeezus out of the mild-mannered councilfolk of little Placentia.
Risky gamble with people’s lives. Half-baked. Untested. Extreme.
It was 2019 and the wee city was contemplating the unthinkable — being the first to pull out of the regional (and very expensive!) Orange County Fire Authority (with its state-of-the-art water-dropping helicopters and bulldozers and hazmat equipment and swift water boats) to form its own “Fire and Life Safety Department.”
But it wasn’t just that. Placentia would do the even more unthinkable: Cleave firefighting duties from emergency medical duties.
No more (very expensive!) firefighters who are also paramedics at every call. No more 25-ton fire trucks arriving beside ambulances for routine medical mishaps. No more fire trucks and their (constant-staffing as per union contract) four-man crews accompanying those ambulances to the hospital and waiting (“wall time”) until the patient is taken by the E.R. before returning to service.
In Placentia’s proposed revolutionary setup (which is really only revolutionary in Orange and Los Angeles counties), firefighters would do the firefighting and a private ambulance company would do the emergency medical/paramedic/lifesaving.
To the old guard in that room that night, this was Armageddon. The crack that could bring down the entire dam. It had to be stopped.
“A Placentia Police Department officer, God forbid, gets shot on these streets — I tell you right now they’ll be the first ones, as they’re bleeding out, wishing OCFA was en route, not a new fire department with volunteers,” Frank Lima of the International Association of Fire Fighters told the city…
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