By Leslie Albrecht
The Merced Sun-Star (California)
Copyright 2006 The Merced Sun-Star
All Rights Reserved
After a 6 a.m. jog followed by an hour of housekeeping around the station, Merced’s newest firefighters really get down to work.
At the fire academy where they’ll train for the next four weeks, the recruits spend their days learning how to make confined space rescues and practicing how to put on their breathing gear in less than a minute. Sometimes they train until after dark. Then they wake up and do it all over again.
In mid-September the new recruits will graduate and join the swelling ranks of Merced’s fire department, which is set to add another 10 new firefighters by next July.
This year’s hiring spree is the biggest staff increase the department has ever seen, said Fire Chief Ken Mitten.
“We’ve been well understaffed for years, this is just bringing us up to speed,” he said.
The beefed-up staff will allow every firetruck to answer calls with three firefighters on board instead of two, said Mitten.
“It takes five or six people on a firetruck to do a job according to national standards,” said Mitten. “If you have to do it with two it’s pretty obvious that you’re way understaffed.”
The added personnel won’t shorten response times, but it will let the department make better use of its resources, said Mitten, because it won’t take two trucks to respond to one call.
Money to fund the 22 new firefighters comes from three different sources. A $900,000 Department of Homeland Security grant pays for nine firefighters. The yearly fees that new homeowners pay cover the costs for three others. The other 13 are funded by money from Measure C, the half-cent sales tax increase that voters passed last November.
Starting base pay for a new fire fighter is $42,396 annually, said Mitten, with about another $20,000 in benefits on top of that.
But it’s not the salary that attracted 29-year-old Jeff Hakola, an Orange County native, to Merced’s fire department.
He said he counted himself lucky to be here because of the fierce competition for firefighting jobs statewide. In Orange County, 2,000 applicants were vying for 30 jobs, he said.
Other new recruits come from places like Fresno, Hayward, and Livingston.
During a quick dinner break Tuesday evening, the new recruits said they were impressed at how their instructors seemed to know Merced inside and out. They also said they liked Merced’s aggressive firefighting strategy, which keeps residents well-protected.
And they commended their superiors for making the new recruits feel welcome.
“In big departments, it’s all political,” said 26-year-old Adam Tiffany of Walnut Creek. “You have to deal with the secretary. Here you can talk to the chief. There’s an open-door policy.”