Memories of sitting at the bottom of a pool flow back when Templeton resident Garrett Huff reflects on practicing for water rescue missions early in his career as a paramedic and firefighter.
“We had to do what they call dunker training,” Huff explained. “You’re strapped into a [simulated] helicopter, and they push it into the pool, and you go all the way to the bottom, and then you have to get yourself out and swim out of it, … all on this little bottle of air that you keep on your chest.”
At the time, Huff was working for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department’s flight paramedic unit, based at the Santa Ynez station on Airport Road. Nearly two decades later, Huff will oversee all 16 of the department’s stations as the county’s new fire chief starting on Dec. 8.
It’s the role he’s been preparing to take on since childhood, said Huff, who’s been with the county since 2005.
“I grew up in somewhat of a rural neighborhood, and there wasn’t a lot of other kids. So I rode my bike around a lot,” recalled Huff, who was born and raised in Simi Valley. “It was kind of a mountain area, and there was a fire station at the bottom of the hill. I would ride my bike to the fire station. And those guys, the firefighters at that time, were always out washing the engine or checking equipment.”
Huff’s casual bike rides to the station led him to become friends with some of the firefighters there, some of whom he’d eventually work with as part of a fire cadet program offered through his high school.
“It was like an ROTC kind of a thing where you got high school credit,” Huff said. “You basically get assigned to a fire station, … and learn the ins and outs of being a firefighter. So, I got to do that my junior and senior year of high school. I knew once I put the uniform on—because we wore the uniform and got the gear and rode the engines—that was it. I knew that was it. That’s all I wanted to do.”
Before graduating from high school, Huff completed an additional program outside of the fire cadet training to become a certified emergency medical technician (EMT).
“I got my EMT certificate my senior year of high school. And then as soon as I graduated, I went to a fire academy,” Huff said. “That same year, I got hired as a seasonal firefighter.”
Between 1999 and 2005, Huff worked for fire departments in Culver City and Paso Robles before starting with Santa Barbara County’s department as a firefighter-paramedic.
Like his introduction to firefighting, the idea of branching into the dual role of a firefighter-paramedic came to Huff early on thanks to the reruns of Emergency! (1972-1977) that he saw on cable growing up.
“I used to watch that show and was like completely enthralled in these guys that were both firefighters and paramedics,” Huff said, referring to the medical drama’s protagonists John Gage and Roy DeSoto.
In Huff’s current role as Santa Barbara County’s deputy fire chief, he oversees the department’s emergency medical services, which includes ambulances that serve parts of New Cuyama, Lompoc, and Isla Vista, and a new dispatch facility that he described as a “game changer” for the county.
“Before the Regional Fire Communication Center, County Fire was dispatched by the sheriff, and so was AMR [American Medical Response]. But we weren’t dispatched together. We were dispatched independently,” Huff said. “We weren’t even on the same radio frequency, so we couldn’t even really talk to each other, … and every medical call, you have a fire engine and an ambulance that couldn’t talk to each other, so that was an issue.”
Getting city councils, law enforcement agencies, and other regional emergency response departments to agree on using a unified dispatch center—to connect 911 callers with resources throughout the county regardless of jurisdiction boundaries—was a huge undertaking, Huff said.
He remembers conversations about the initiative from as far back as 10 years. In 2017, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors greenlit plans for the Fire Department’s proposed facility, which broke ground in 2023 and opened to full operation in late June. A formal ribbon cutting will take place on Dec. 9.
“What we’ve done now is we’ve brought everybody under one roof,” Huff said. “Now we’re all on the same frequency, including the ambulances. … Now we have a better understanding of where they are and we can talk to them, so that’s a huge improvement from what we had before.”
In 2023, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department also geared up to replace AMR as the county’s ambulance provider.
The department purchased 35 ambulances that year, but its plans for a March 2024 start date halted after a county Superior Court judge granted AMR an injunction amid its lawsuit that challenged the new arrangement.
In February, the county Board of Supervisors voted to repeal its agreement with the Fire Department and renew AMR’s contract to provide ambulance services.
“That whole ambulance initiative didn’t work out in our favor, but we did give it a try,” Huff said. “We ended up liquidating all the equipment we purchased. We only had hired one person, and that person had been transferred by choice to the dispatch center.”
Commuting to the new dispatch center in Goleta and the Fire Department’s stations throughout Santa Barbara County means some long drives for Huff from his home in Templeton, but he doesn’t plan on relocating any time soon.
“I’ve always commuted in, but it’s never been a problem, … and now that my kids are in high school and middle school, I can’t pull them out at this point,” Huff said. “My oldest son had a hard time finding his friend group, and he’s finally found it and I’m not going to take that away from him.”
When Huff’s younger son, 11, found out about his dad’s recent promotion to fire chief, he told him, “‘Maybe I should be a firefighter,’” Huff said.
“It was kind of a cool feeling because he had never mentioned that before,” Huff said, “but I would never push my kids to do it. They’d have to want to do it.”
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 4 – Dec 11, 2025.