In the years after one of the hardest moments of his life, longtime Central Coast resident and firefighter David has reflected on the events surrounding his dad’s death.
David lost his father in 2004 to a heart attack. He experienced the major cardiac event at home in Orcutt, and though he didn’t survive, the service he received from those who tried to save him was “incredible,” David recalled. But if responders could have arrived earlier, David wonders if his dad’s outcome would have been the same.
“The station that was near the house was a mile away. But the one that was sent was a mile and a half further away; it was two and a half miles away,” said David, whose name was changed because he still works as a firefighter and requested anonymity. “I was in such a shock for so many years of losing my dad and trying to take care of my family afterwards, I never really got to think, ‘Why wasn’t the closest fire station sent?’ … Until recently, when I started noticing a lot of similar types of responses in the local area.”
Orcutt’s fire stations, which once made up their own fire district, moved under Santa Barbara County Fire Department control in 2008, and some former and current firefighters feel that the resources allocated to Orcutt were reduced in the process. They also said they were concerned that the closest resource isn’t always sent to emergency calls and point to instances when Orcutt’s two fire stations are responding elsewhere in the county, leaving the community stripped of emergency responders.
The county Fire Department also needs to tackle its response times: According to a 2020 Citygate Associates study, county fire’s response time—from answering a 911 call to arriving on the scene—is 2 minutes and 22 seconds slower than Citygate-recommended best practices.
Concerned locals and the county Fire Department agree that a regional fire dispatch center would solve some of these problems, and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors committed to building one earlier this year. But the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, which currently handles dispatch for county fire, thinks building a new $10 million center doesn’t address the root of the issue.
David said he supports centralizing fire dispatch but that adding fire resources in Orcutt is more pressing: The area just needs more options available to respond to emergencies. From his experience, it’s a matter of life and death.
Volunteer roots
Nearly a century ago, in 1928, the Orcutt Fire Protection District was formed. Prior to that, “fire protection was almost nonexistent in the Orcutt area,” according to county fire’s website.
“It was only after nearly all of the entire Orcutt business district was destroyed by a fire that the county Board of Commissioners approved and created the Orcutt Fire District,” according to the county Fire Department. “Volunteers from the area then manned it. In 1966, a new fire station was built at 335 Union St. for Orcutt Fire Chief Ed Cox and his group of volunteers.”
The Old Town Orcutt station still operates today as county Station 21.
With shiny, modern fire trucks and equipment parked inside the station, remnants from the past still adorn the walls. A wooden sign carved with Station 21’s official motto, “No Luck Needed,” hangs above the station’s office door, and inside the office, there’s a framed black and white photograph of the Far Western Tavern (in its original Guadalupe location) with a billow of smoke rising above it.
Nailed to the outside of the station is a memorial plaque dedicated to Chief Ron Bennett, who died of a heart attack in 2007, right as things were changing for Orcutt and its fire district.
“Around 2006, the cost of business was outpacing the intake of money from the tax revenue,” said Brett Pickett, who was appointed as the Orcutt Fire Protection District’s interim fire chief after Bennett died and is currently a county firefighter. “The Orcutt Fire Protection District received a tax base from the residents within the district.”
Orcutt tried to enact a benefit assessment—a fee property owners pay for a public service—to bolster the department’s budget, but residents “didn’t want a tax increase,” Pickett said.
Meanwhile, county fire needed to find a new home for its station at the Santa Maria Public Airport. The Santa Maria Airport District acquired the airport in 1963, but an agreement allowed the county to build and staff a fire station there, which was completed in 1970 and served the Santa Maria Valley, including Orcutt, for decades.
“There was a fire engine and a crash truck with a three-man crew,” Pickett said. “If there was a fire or a medical [emergency] in the Santa Maria Valley, that fire engine would go.”
Around 2007, during the time of consolidation talks between the Orcutt Fire Protection District and county fire, Santa Maria was considering building a new city fire station on the airport property, which it had annexed. Though that station was never built, it prompted the county Fire Department to consider relocating its crew from the airport station, Pickett said.
Between the financial trouble Orcutt Fire Protection District was in and the county needing to move its airport station, “it all came together at the same time” for county fire to take over Orcutt’s fire stations, Pickett said.
But, he added, there were mixed emotions about the change.
Former Orcutt Fire Chief Kirk Mang said the consolidation wasn’t welcomed by everyone. Mang joined the Orcutt Fire Protection District in 1983 and was promoted to chief in 1990.
“It was more community oriented,” said Mang, who described an era of fire department-hosted block parties and a large presence in hometown parades. “Kids would stop by the department all the time. I always told the guys working, if any children show up [and] want to see the fire equipment, let them see it, let them climb on it.”
He served as chief for 13 years before retiring in 2003, when Bennett took over the post. After Bennett passed away unexpectedly in November 2007, Pickett became the interim chief for Orcutt, and John Scherrie was the county fire chief.
From Pickett’s perspective, the consolidation was “a win-win scenario for Orcutt and the county Fire Department.”
But for some, the move meant a loss of tradition.
“When it came time that we merged with county fire, we were told a lot of things by John Scherrie and his staff: ‘We’re going to keep the traditions, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’” Mang recalled. “They immediately stopped doing the Christmas Parade. … They stopped doing the other community things like the Halloween block party. A lot of things changed.”
Under-resourced
David, the local firefighter who lost his dad to a heart attack, sees the consolidation as a turning point for the town’s fire resources. After the county moved in and the Santa Maria Airport station stopped responding to calls in the valley, David said Orcutt lost a station.
“[Taking that away] was a huge mistake on the county’s part,” David said. “The station’s still there but does not have a fire engine running calls at the north end of Orcutt. People still think [it serves Orcutt] to this day.”
Pickett said that, on paper, the consolidation reduced Orcutt’s stations. But in his eyes, the situation isn’t black and white.
As a combination volunteer and paid-call department, Orcutt fire stations weren’t staffed 24 hours a day before the consolidation.
“A trend was starting to develop that it was harder to man those pieces of equipment” in the stations, Pickett said.
When the county took over, the stations became fully staffed 24 hours a day. But at the same time, Pickett said, those fully staffed engines were also responding to emergencies outside of Orcutt, sometimes leaving the community with no local coverage.
Pros and cons aside, Pickett believes consolidation was inevitable: Orcutt Fire Protection District wasn’t financially sustainable anymore, he said.
“I don’t want to say the Orcutt Fire Department wasn’t serving their community: They were 100 percent dedicated to delivering the best service possible,” Pickett said. “But the writing was on the wall that it was going to get harder and harder.”
Mang doesn’t see it solely as a funding issue.
“We were working fine with the funding we had,” Mang said. “Obviously we could have used more; we were a small agency—one department, four pieces of equipment, 30 guys on the department. We were volunteer for the most part.
“I’ll be real honest, I think it was more of an ego thing: They didn’t like a volunteer fire department in Santa Barbara County.”
While people may disagree on what the 2008 consolidation meant for Orcutt, one point seems to resonate with everyone today.
“There does need to be another fire station in Orcutt, just due to the population,” Pickett said. “That’s a no-brainer.”
According to census data, Orcutt’s population grew by more than 3,000 people from 2010 to 2020.
A new station isn’t the only big plan on the docket: County fire also believes building a regional fire dispatch center—which would centralize fire dispatch, while splitting from the Sheriff’s Office—is another key piece to improving response times.
But Sheriff’s Office dispatch sees things differently.
Who answers the call?
When someone in the county’s jurisdiction calls 911 for a fire or medical emergency, the Sheriff’s Office dispatches the county fire resource. The Santa Barbara County Fire Department mans stations throughout the region, from Goleta to Orcutt to parts of the Santa Ynez Valley.
The sheriff’s dispatch department already uses a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system to assign the closest resource available to the emergencies. But dispatchers also have to follow district and agency boundaries. Local fire chiefs agree on these boundaries through memorandums of understanding (MOUs) that the Sheriff’s Office has no control over.
If there’s a vehicle accident on Highway 166, for example, and the closest resource is a Santa Maria city fire station, that doesn’t mean Santa Maria will respond.
“Highway 166 is within the county, and is an area where the service is provided by the county,” county fire Public Information Officer Capt. Daniel Bertucelli explained. “If engine companies were pulled out of the city of Santa Maria in order to go out to Highway 166 for a vehicle accident, then that would be pulling resources out of the city where the taxpayers of Santa Maria pay to have their resources available for incidents within the city.”
However, through automatic aid agreements, sometimes city resources can get pulled into the county’s jurisdiction, or vice versa.
“An automatic aid agreement is an agreement between agencies that share borders,” Bertucelli said. “If there is a call that’s on the border of the two agencies’ district line, then a resource from the other agency will go across that line to respond and assist.”
Cities that have their own fire departments, like Santa Maria or Lompoc, also operate their own dispatch centers. If a call is right on the border between Orcutt and Santa Maria, but technically in Orcutt, the county would get the call and respond first with a county fire engine.
“Then our dispatch center would physically place a phone call to the Santa Maria city dispatch center, and advise them of a call that’s on the border, and then Santa Maria city would, in turn, dispatch one of their engines,” Bertucelli said.
Robert, a former local firefighter who requested anonymity to protect his career, said the Saint Marie Mobile Home Park is a good example of automatic aid in a border area. Located at 1380 W. Main St., the park is just barely outside Santa Maria city limits.
Orcutt’s two engine companies—located at Station 21 in Old Town and Station 26 right next to Highway 101—both come equipped with paramedics, so they respond to medical emergencies. Currently, if a medical call comes in from the trailer park, “county engine 21 will go to that medical call, and then Santa Maria city will get a call to send an engine to that call,” Robert said.
“To have two engines on scene of a medical call seems ridiculous to me,” Robert continued. “It seems that, even if this trailer park is in the county area, send Santa Maria city, because they’re closest.”
He added that when the Santa Maria Fire Department sends its engine, an ambulance goes with it, so any emergency medical needs on scene would still be covered. From Robert’s perspective, sending two engines to an incident that only requires one responder unnecessarily ties up an Orcutt resource.
In a worst-case scenario, if both Orcutt engines are committed to calls at the time of an emergency in Orcutt, resources from elsewhere in the county will have to come in, increasing that response time even more, Robert said.
Dispatch debate
This is where the regional dispatch center comes in.
“It would essentially take away all the different little dispatch centers, which have to call each other when there’s a call on the border,” Bertucelli said. “There would be one regional fire dispatch center. That would alleviate this issue of calls that arrive on the borders, because it’s what we call borderless dispatching. The closest, most appropriate piece of equipment would respond to any given call that comes in.”
The center, which the Board of Supervisors approved design plans for in July, is expected to go live in January 2024, Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Mark Hartwig said.
But county Dispatch Manager Susan Farley said that building a regional fire dispatch center doesn’t change the fact that both an Orcutt county engine and a Santa Maria city engine respond to medical calls at a place like the Saint Marie Mobile Home Park.
“They are going to have to redo their MOUs, because right now, it’s an auto-aid situation,” Farley said. “If it’s in the county, county has to respond because they’re the one writing the report. And if it’s in the city, the city has to respond even if county is closer, because they have to write the report.
“That has nothing to do with who dispatches,” she continued, “that has to do with back-end decisions made by fire chiefs.”
Farley believes closest resource issues can be solved by rewriting the MOUs and auto-aid agreements, as well as upgrading the sheriff’s dispatch system. The Board of Supervisors recently approved the latter.
“Right now, we know their station address, and that’s what it recommends [the closest resource] based on,” Farley said.
The upgraded computer-aided dispatch, called a CAD to CAD link, will give the dispatchers the precise locations of engines when they’re not at their stations.
“It’s a lot cheaper to implement a computer system than it is to build a new dispatch center,” Farley said.
She estimates that the upgraded dispatch system will cost about $56,000.
County Fire Chief Hartwig has served in his current position since 2019 and previously was the San Bernardino County Fire District chief. It was there that Hartwig saw how a regional dispatch operates and, from his perspective, its benefits.
Dropping boundary lines, Hartwig said, is the largest advantage.
“It’s getting that fire, rescue, and EMS resource—which in many cases is time sensitive—[dispatching] that closest, most available resource for that 911 caller as soon as possible,” Hartwig said. “That’s really the value.”
Hartwig said that it’s “a much bigger issue than just MOUs,” and said the CAD upgrade is not enough.
“In order to do that, you have to rebuild the entire computer-aided dispatch software,” he said. “CAD to CAD is really best for seeing where another person’s resources are, if you want them. But it’s never been used, from what we can tell, to dispatch that other resource. … The only place that I and the other fire chiefs in the county have seen that done is in a joint regional center.”
In 2019, without joint fire dispatch, the Santa Maria Fire Department responded to calls in the county’s jurisdiction 213 times, and the county responded to Santa Maria city emergencies 116 times.
“That’s calls that were either on the border, or that they didn’t have resources available, and they called the other dispatch center and asked for help,” Hartwig said.
With the joint dispatch center, Hartwig said those numbers will go up.
“Currently, we only reach out and ask for help when we don’t have an engine available to respond, or we’re on the border,” Hartwig said. “The idea is that now, instead of picking up the phone and calling, or making decisions based on jurisdiction, we will be making the decision based on the need of the person calling, regardless of jurisdiction.”
Searching for a solution
Firefighter David, who lost his dad to cardiac arrest, believes that Orcutt’s fire response needs more than centralized dispatch.
“We need more boots on the ground, more rigs rolling on the street,” he said. “Dispatch is only part of the equation, but if you don’t have the resources to dispatch, then we’re not getting anywhere.”
He also thinks the county should add an engine in Orcutt, “like, right now.”
“Put it in service at one of the Orcutt stations currently, and then make civil accommodations for sleeping quarters and for the guys to operate at that station,” he said.
County Chief Hartwig agrees that a new station is essential, and said the wheels are in motion to build one as soon as possible. A 2012 county-commissioned Citygate Associates study called for increased service in the Orcutt area, Hartwig said. A 2020 update to that study, this time commissioned by county fire, specifically recommends an additional engine company.
County fire’s average call-to-arrival response time in 2019 was 9 minutes and 52 seconds, while best practice is considered to be 7 minutes and 30 seconds, the report states. Orcutt Station 21’s response time is higher than the county average, at 10 minutes and 9 seconds.
“In Orcutt, the existing stations serve a large urban and adjoining county area,” the report states. “ … In light of this, a third station in the Orcutt area will significantly increase response capacity.”
Hartwig said the county already purchased land for the new station in the Union Valley and Orcutt Boulevard area, and it’s in escrow right now.
David looks forward to the day the station is up and running, but it’s hard for him to let go of the fact that it didn’t happen sooner. As he experienced firsthand with the death of his father, every second counts in an emergency like a cardiac arrest.
According to the 2012 Citygate report, when the heart stops in a heart attack, the human brain starts to die from lack of oxygen in four to six minutes, with brain damage becoming irreversible at the 10-minute mark.
County dispatchers do give CPR instructions over the phone until professional help gets to the scene. But survival rates increase dramatically when an automated external defibrillator is administered early, and in most circumstances, that requires paramedics.
For fire emergencies, early response is also critical: A room can become engulfed in flames in as little as four to five minutes, the Citygate report said.
“You’ll never understand it fully until it happens to you,” David said. “The people deserve it. My dad deserved it. … He did not get that care fast enough, and who knows what would have happened if the guys got there sooner. I think he would have had a better shot at living.”
Reach Staff Writer Malea Martin at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2021.
