The Central Coast’s fire season started early and in full force this year with the 25,000-acre Spring Fire in Ventura and the 2,000-acre White Fire in the Santa Ynez Valley.
With firefighters in such high demand, it came as an unpleasant surprise when Vandenberg Professional Firefighters Local F-116 announced on May 30 that its decades-old Hot Shot program will be eliminated in September. Also, all 57 of the civilian firefighters in the base’s fire department will face furloughs over the next three months as part of the federal sequestration.
Vandenberg Professional Firefighters President Mike Provencio explained that the local blaze battlers are some of the 800,000 civilian U.S. Department of Defense employees being furloughed.
The Hot Shot team—the only one of its kind in the country—launched in the 1970s after a fire on Vandenberg Air Force Base killed the base commander, deputy commander, fire chief, and a dozer operator. The team is a highly trained hand crew that helps protect the base and also responds to fires throughout the state and country.
“The Hot Shot crew has been completely depleted. It’s down to nine firefighters from 21,” Provencio said. “People have been leaving because of everything that’s been going on with the budget.”
He said that once the program shuts down, the remaining firefighters will be brought on-shift at the base, most likely as a vegetation management crew.
“So they won’t be losing their jobs, but they’ll be picked up only to be hit with furloughs,” he said, adding that it doesn’t make sense to furlough firefighters at the peak of fire season.
Provencio and his fellow union members would like their positions— and those of other health and safety officials employed by the federal government—to be exempt from furlough cuts during the sequestration.
“They need to permanently fund the entire Hot Shot crew and keep them on base,” Provencio said. “It’s been a very big fire season already, and we’re about to hit the hot months.”
There’s currently a bill making its way through the U.S. Senate that would that would preserve funding for “essential employees who perform work involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”
According to Provencio, the firefighters union has already reached out to California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein about the bill, and they’re in support of it passing.
This article appears in Jun 6-13, 2013.