I dont think there is an easy answer to appropriate fire/ems protection. In a lot of ways your comparing apples to oranges. Looking at my old department, vs another department about an hour north of us as neutral examples, even though the cities were very close in population and size, the other city has a lot of higher speed roads, but we have a lot more industrial and medical facilities, where they have a lot more older residential, ours is newer. And we have the same number of stations, and equipment, but they had more manpower.
Going back to the Creek, there budget is based more on corporate decision making, It really has not been working. For example, when station 4 opened, they took the engine from St 1, 1 of the rescues from there, and another from St 2 with their crews and called it good. They used the tower as first out to fires. Until they got the tire bills because of the way the station sits to the road, they turn 2 or 3 times on the way out and 5 on the way in, which killed the rear tandems on a regular basis. Like every 2 months they were replacing 8 tires at 600 bucks each. So there solution was move it to station 4 and bring the engine back to 1. That required moving both the tower and the heavy (since they were crossed manned) and renumbering the trucks so that was 4500 bucks renumbering 3 trucks. Then some one said, the tower and heavys response was too long to the other side of property so they did it again, for another 4500 dollars to renumber the 3 trucks again. This went on for about 2 years. 2 or 3x per year. Before they finally replaced the missing engine. They just did it again recently, they added a 5th engine to cover a new area being developed by Animal Kingdom. There using an older engine that was just replaced with new, which was probably a spare to begin with. And put it in an existing station, with the same number of members as they did before. They took 1 or 2 members per st, per shift to man the new engine.
Another example, is there special ops program. They started it up, got crews trained in the 5 disciplines, and after about 3 or 4 years the district canceled most of it, saying that theyll rely on Orange County when its needed. Problem is, that OCFR Special Ops trucks are running 1 and 2nd due fire and ems calls arent available all the time. And it takes 2 OCFR squads to make 1 complete team. And they only have 3. Squad 3, assuming Squad 1 is available, is roughly an hour. Ballpark. Squad 4, is maybe the same.
In short the district which governs the FD is burying there heads in the sand, and saying that well it didnt happen yesterday so it wont happen tom.
www.firefighternation.com
