By Scott Mobley
The Record Searchlight
REDDING, Calif. — Redding officials have already learned they can’t use volunteer firefighters to make up for a critical shortage of paid professionals.
Now, some City Council members want to explore whether an automatic dispatch agreement with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection would help.
Yet automatic aid among Shasta County fire protection agencies could never really exist without a complete overhaul of emergency communications, a top Cal Fire official said.
City or county crews would be sent to fires in each other’s jurisdictions as a matter of course rather than waiting for assistance calls, under an automatic aid agreement.
The city of Redding and Cal Fire operate on different dispatching systems, said Rick Kyle, Shasta County fire warden. Kyle also is chief of the Shasta County Fire Department and Cal Fire’s Shasta-Trinity unit.
“Automatic aid is not so automatic,” Kyle said. “There are two- to three-minute delays as one dispatching entity passes information onto the next.”
Shasta County Fire doesn’t have much more assistance to give the city than it already provides, Kyle said. Volunteer stations are staffed 52 percent and some Cal Fire and county fire stations operate only in summer. City and county fire officials already work closely together, Kyle said. If a county fire battalion chief sees a large smoke plume in the city they’ll call up four more engines on their own, he said.
“The world would be a better place if we could get the most out of our cooperative agreement,” said Kyle. “But given the difficult financial times and the equipment and staffing we have, the present system is about as good as we’re going to get.”
The city of Redding has mutual aid agreements with Cal Fire, Shasta County Fire and numerous volunteer fire departments around the county.
City crews respond to county fires and vice-versa when called, under mutual aid.
Redding last year provided mutual aid 47 times and received it 18 times, usually for station coverage during emergencies. That ratio is similar to comparable cities around Northern California.
The number of mutual aid requests from Redding to Cal Fire will likely rise this year, since the city decided to close Station 2 and eliminate 10 firefighter positions to make up for a $1.34 million fire department budget shortfall.
So far this year, a threealarm fire just south of downtown and another three-alarm fire on North Market Street have emptied every station in town. Cal Fire has helped cover stations and fight the fires themselves.
The county sent 10 engines to help Redding firefighters battle flames that destroyed the southern wing of America’s Best Value Inn & Suites on North Market.
Even with the help, three Redding firefighters were hospitalized during that blaze because there were not enough crews to rotate shifts before heat exhaustion set in.
Kevin Kreitman, Redding fire chief, declined to comment on a potential automatic aid with Shasta County Fire or Cal Fire, noting he was under council orders to not spend a great deal of time on the matter.
Kreitman said he’ll give a brief oral report on automatic aid to the council Aug. 16.
Council member Patrick Jones on July 19th asked fellow council members if they were interested in starting talks with Cal Fire about an automatic aid agreement to help make up for the loss of Fire Station 2, which closed just after the New Year holiday. A majority of council members expressed interest.
Jones earlier this year had asked Kreitman to investigate whether the city could make up for the loss of Station 2 and 10 firefighters with volunteers.
Staffing Station 2 with volunteers would be a complex, costly undertaking, Kreitman told the council in June.
State and federal safety rules now require volunteers receive the same intensive training professional firefighters undergo, Kreitman said.
Providing that training would prove expensive and time-consuming for the city, he said. Volunteers would need four to six years to meet training and experience requirements. Few people these days are willing to devote so much time for no compensation, he said.
Volunteering “requires unique individuals with a strong commitment who should be commended,” Kreitman said.
The city would need six full-time firefighters to staff a two-person engine. Redding would have to round up to 12 to 15 volunteers to staff the engine, given training requirements.
Neither Shasta College nor the Shasta County Fire Department was interested in staffing Fire Station 2 with volunteers, Kreitman told the council.
Council member Francie Sullivan, who is liaison to the fire department, said at the meeting July 19th researching an automatic aid agreement with Cal Fire would prove just as wasteful of Chief Kreitman’s time as the volunteer staffing issue.
“I think it should be obvious no one cares more about protecting us than the fire department,” Sullivan said. “The fire chief is aware of every possibility of working with other agencies. If he thought this (automatic aid) was something that would be extremely helpful, he would bring it to us.”
A council majority agreed Kreitman should devote far less time to researching automatic aid than he spent preparing a written report on volunteer staffing.
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