Wood chips are flying. Smoke billows everywhere. Grandma, a 1929 American LaFrance fire engine, sits in wait as Guadalupe Fire Capt. Rick Galindo hacks his way out of a wire-strung box as part of a training exercise. It’s just another Tuesday night for the Guadalupe Fire Department.
Guadalupe is one of the last “paid shift” fire departments in Santa Barbara County—but don’t let the talk of money fool you. Twenty bucks for a 12-hour shift works out to around $1.66 an hour. But, Galindo says, considering all the hours spent working outside their shifts, the figure is closer to 27 cents an hour.
“We call it our lunch money,” Engineer Aston Lara says with a laugh. Chuckles go up around the table at this.
But meals are paid for, right?
Lara grins: “Nope.”
Call it what you will. This is a volunteer outfit.
Community service and fundraising are ways of life around here. Christmas Day saw the firefighters handing out candy in the rain. They had to fundraise for new turnouts—the fire-resistant uniforms they wear on calls—yet they still regularly donate to most of Guadalupe’s youth sports teams.
The firefighters work two days on, four days off with their “day” lasting from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. The shift captains (the only three full-time positions) work the same two-on, four-off schedule, but they work those 48 hours straight through.
Everyone else has a day job to pay the bills.
Elena Soto, the department’s other engineer, drives ambulances for American Medical Response and just finished paramedic school. Juan Martinez was laid off from his manager’s job at Target, but has been working for the store in a part-time seasonal position. Daniel Maldonado handles tech support for a VoIP company in Santa Maria, while Aston Lara works for Bank of America. Others—like Terry Cummings, Pat Schmidtz, and John Miller—are instructors at Allan Hancock College.
And all of them, at some point, have been out all night on a call, then had to go their day jobs the next morning.
“The boss knows when it’s been a long night,” Lara says.
Even when there are no calls, something’s always going on for the firefighters. Some nights that means going up on the roofs of local buildings to get the lay of the land.
“We want to have an idea of what to expect,” says Capt. Galindo, standing atop Guadalupe’s Main Street Market after a ladder drill.
“Like that pipe you’re standing over right there,” adds firefighter Schmidtz. “That’s a natural gas pipe.”
Definitely one of those things you want to be aware of in a fire.
‘Too easy’
Other nights, staying busy includes a training prop used to simulate a ceiling collapse. They call it the X-Box. It’s an 8-by-3-by-3-foot wooden tunnel strung with a tangle of wire that would make a groundhog claustrophobic. Instead of an exit, there’s a piece of plywood screwed into two 16-inch studs. To get out, the firefighter has to break through with an axe. And they do it all on their back.
“Actually, it’s more of an angle, because we’ve got our air bottles strapped to our backs,” Lara notes.
Some of these guys are 6-foot, 200-plus pounds, and they have to make it through in full gear with their hood pulled over their mask to simulate a smoke-filled environment.
Every member of the department has been through the X-Box, and, according to Maldonado, every one of them has gotten stuck at one point or another.
On a late-December evening, Galindo is showing everyone how it’s done. With a loud thump, his axe bites through the wood. The next hit knocks the piece clean off the studs.
“Too easy!” he says, smoke pouring out around him. “Put it back on.”
Schmidtz, a Chilean ex-pat, steps forward obligingly and reattaches the plywood with no fewer than eight screws. He adds an extra plank across the top for good measure.
“He did say it was too easy,” Lara says, grinning.
This barrier stays in place as Galindo goes to work with his axe. Still, he begins to break through the barrier, breathing heavily. This from a guy who leads his people on 4-mile runs and 100-pushup, 200-situp workouts. You feel like sweating just watching him.
Finally, with the wood looking like a beaver’s playground, Galindo batters open a hole large enough to squeeze his head and shoulders through. He pulls himself the rest of the way out.
“This is fun,” he says with a wide smile and utter sincerity in his voice. Steam pours off of him in the cold air.
Before the flames
The stories of how the Guadalupe firefighters came to battle smoke and flames are as varied as the men and women who tell them. Schmidtz explains that in Chile, all firefighters are volunteers.
“Some friends and I saw a fire truck go zipping by one night, so we decided to follow it,” he remembers. “We came to a stoplight and saw a guy throwing on gear and trying to catch a cab. We offered him a ride, and when we got to the fire, they figured I was there to help, so they tossed me a turnout and put me to work. Next morning, I went down to the station and asked for a job, and here I am.”
Capt. Galindo knew he what he wanted to do with his life after his brother “had a chunk taken out of his leg” by a dog while they were on their paper route.
“I was freaking out, whoa this is crazy. I hated feeling helpless,” he says. “Our parents got a call, and by that time the ambulance and fire truck had shown up. Pretty much from that point, I really wanted to be in a field where I could help people.
“[Being a firefighter] was pretty much my goal growing up, my focus that got me through high school.”
Galindo spent six years with the U.S. Forest Service before joining the Guadalupe Fire Department and working his way up through the ranks.
Lara grew up doing volunteer work at concerts with Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics before becoming an EMT.
“I started when I was 12 years old, handing out bottles of Gatorade and Band-Aids at all kinds of different concerts,” Lara says. “Then in high school, we got to go to the fire station and there was nothing like having the garage door opening up and there’s the big ol’ truck and the guys coming out, all smiling.”
Around and ahead
It’s not just hometown fires for these firefighters: Guadalupe Fire has been involved in fighting major California wildfires over the last two years as part of Cal Fire’s Mutual Aid Strike Teams.
According to Schmidtz—who’s been on every strike team Guadalupe Fire has been a part of—when the call goes out from Cal Fire, Santa Barbara County assembles its fighters. Members of the County Fire Department always make up the first team out. The second team, when needed, is made up of a mix of departments from Lompoc, Santa Maria, and Guadalupe.
These local strike teams battled blazes at the recent Gap fire, the Harris fire in San Diego, and the SHU lightning fire in Chico, among others.
“We’ve been around the state a bit,” Schmidtz says.
As much as they all love the job as is, just about everyone agrees that the ideal would be a full-time position in the department. But is there any hope of Guadalupe Fire going full time down the road?
“Definitely,” Maldonado says. “The amount of traffic, the type of people that come here, the dunes … there’s such a huge window for this to definitely grow.”
Everyone agrees that it’s not a matter of “if” Guadalupe Fire goes to a full-time operation, but “when.” According to Galindo, it’s all about the numbers.
“We have the highest percentage of response calls that go up per year—on average 20 percent per year,” he says.
Until that time comes, the Guadalupe Fire Department will continue as a volunteer operation. Lara does the math and realizes he’s been doing volunteer work of some type or another for almost 15 years. But that’s just fine: “I don’t do this for anything other than love.”
Contributor Nicholas Walter does everything for love. Contact him through the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 8-15, 2009.