In the 174 stations of the county there are more emergency calls, more fires, but work continues with the same resources 20 years ago.

At the small fire station number 18 in Lennox, an unincorporated area of ​​Los Angeles County adjacent to Inglewood, four firefighters were preparing for their usual 24-hour guard. Despite its small size, with a single truck, a captain, an equipment engineer and two firefighters-paramedics, Company 18 is the ninth busiest of the 174 that exist in the county.

"The last year we have full statistics, which is 2018, we answered 4924 calls," explains Captain Randall Wright, a 14-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Fire Department who recently rose to that position. As captain, Wright is in charge of the shift, during which he and the other three officers will live together as companions and almost family, for 24 hours, and will mainly attend health emergencies such as heart attacks, embolisms, accidents, etc.

The four officers, including the captain, are both firefighters and paramedics, and can do both jobs at any given time. They are the ones who respond, in addition to an ambulance with paramedics – in this case, hired a private company – when someone calls 911 with a health problem.

In recent years, with the increase in population, these calls have been increasing, while fire seasons have also extended to more months of the year.

In Lennox station as in the rest, technological equipment is outdated.

“In the years I have here I have seen the volume of calls grow massively,” said Wright. “I have had my whole career working in this area of ​​Inglewood, Lennox and I can tell you that our days and nights are busier than ever. The pace is dizzying. ”

A few seconds later, the alarm sounds: there is an emergency call in Inglewood. The fire department responsible for the call is attending another emergency, and the dispatch center assigns the response to the company 18. Immediately, the engineer Martín González gets behind the wheel of the massive fire truck, while the others take Your posts

The rookie of the four is Brayden Turnbull, who is 3 and a half years old in the department. "The population continues to rise, but budgets do not," he explains. "We have a volume of calls from 15 to 20 per day."

This call is about an African-American woman in her 57s who collapsed in her room and now does not respond consistently to the questions of paramedics. While the veteran paramedic Joshua De Journett He takes care of the woman, Turnbull finding out all his medical information with other people present in the house and placing them in a file on a Tablet. They take vital signs and following medical protocols, decide to take her to the hospital to monitor her for possible cerebral embolism.

When paramedics are about to take her to the ambulance, a sister appears and says she doesn't want to be taken. Captain Wright explains that since the woman cannot answer for herself, it is best to take her to understand what happened to her and offer her the best treatment. The sister accepts and the ambulance leaves.

“One of the most stressful tasks we have, apart from responding to calls and applying all the treatments we can to preserve the person's life is dealing with family members. We have an obligation to apply a certain protocol and also, sometimes, to inform them of the worst, ”said Wright. “At least half of the time it is up to us to tell someone that one of the people they love most in this world has died. This is something we do with a lot of respect, but that also touches us inside. ”

LA firefighters attend one of the thousands of emergency calls they receive.

The calls follow one after another. An obese man with a severe asthma attack. A Latina lady with a panic attack that can easily be mistaken for heart failure. On the way from one call to another, the captain decides to stop to check if a business that had a recent inspection has resolved certain fire safety problems that were pending. "We may have to give them a citation," Wright said.

Firefighters – paramedics are the first line of health response, are those who put out fires and control chemical spills as one that happened a few weeks ago on a highway in Los Angeles. They are the ones who responded to the schools where students and teachers suffered the toxic consequences of the fuel spilled by a Delta Airlines plane when it had to land emergency recently. On top of that, they should do the paperwork of everything that happens at the station, including shopping, cleaning the bathrooms, washing the truck and doing 900 business inspections a year.

It is an intense job, especially if one takes into account that in the last twelve years the calls have increased by 50% and the resources only by 5%. For more than 20 years, county voters have not approved a tax increase for firefighters and property taxes are the only source of legal income for financing their work.

In addition to all this, the fire seasons are no longer as before, when they were concentrated in a few months a year. Now there can be uncontrolled fires almost all year.

All Los Angeles firefighters had to respond to the huge fires of November 2018 in southern California. The simultaneous explosion of Camp Fire in Butte County in northern California and the Woolsey and Hill fires in southern California made it impossible for some departments to help others, as is often the case.

“We all responded to these fires. Every day off they were canceled, ”said Wright. "I never saw activity like that, Woolsey's fire jumped the eight lanes of the 101 Freeway."

The County Department is "pressured" by increasing activity and lack of sufficient resources to grow as necessary. Work increases, but resources do not.

Around 1 pm, firefighters take a small break to buy their lunch and meet in the kitchen of the station, where they also cook when they have time.

Now they talk about doing a general cleaning because they are soon receiving an internal inspection of the conditions of the equipment they are in charge of. "There is always work," said Gonzalez, the only Latin firefighter of the four, and who is responsible for communicating with Spanish-speaking people who are the majority of the area where they operate.

"It is important to have someone who speaks their language and understand their culture, because you work with people at a critical time in their life and that helps explain the things that are happening and calm some situations."

They barely make a coffee, the alarm sounds, and they must run again. Someone else will put their lives in the hands of these public servants and they will respond, as always, with all the resources they have at hand and the goal of saving life and property.

Firefighters call 911 in these March 3 elections

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