Fire Report Recommends Boundary Drop as Lynch Pin to Reduction of Fire Personnel

The Vanguard reported on Sunday that the city of Davis has failed to implement simple reforms we might refer to as a boundary drop, that would allow the closest station to respond to an emergency call for service, regardless of whether it is a city of Davis or a UC Davis station.

As Interim Chief Scott Kenley noted in his report, a UC Davis unit cannot be the first responder to an emergency in the city.

He writes, “Currently, Engine Thirty-four is not on the initial call for any emergency calls within the City of Davis’s response boundaries, including simultaneous calls in Engine Thirty-one’s first-in response area.”

“I think you and the rest of the public would be surprised how many times Davis Fire sends E-32 or E-33 to an emergency that E-34 or T-34 is closer to,” said one of our sources, who asked not to be identified, to the Vanguard.

While sources at UC Davis place the blame with union opposition led by Bobby Weist, the Fire Audit Report by Interim Chief Scott Kenley lays out the implications of the problem in great detail.

As early as 1993, the city of Davis and UC Davis had signed an agreement entitled, “Guiding Principles for Collaboration between UC Davis and City of Davis Fire Departments.” It was signed by then-Davis Mayor Lois Wolk and UC Davis Vice Chancellor Janet Hamilton in November of 1993.

However, the report makes it clear that we have had a cooperative agreement with UC Davis for 19 years that has never been fully implemented but, as Chief Kenley also noted, in November 1994 the city and UC Davis signed a shared services agreement for Incident Command and Training.  He writes, “Throughout the research in preparation of this document, there is no record of either of these agreements having been repealed or abandoned.”

Among the principles was, “Assessing fire station locations using a community-wide perspective, rather than an individual entity perspective, for optimal resource utilization and emergency coverage.”

“This principle implies that the departments should drop the boundaries between the two entities and develop station distribution and response strategies as if they were one department,” Chief Kenley summarizes later in his report.

The concept of boundary drop has been recommended in at least three external studies commissioned by the city of  Davis.

The Citygate report, for example, from 2009 that we have covered extensively, finds that “in the combined area of Davis and UC Davis, four fire stations staffed with a total of 15 firefighters on duty are wholly adequate to cover the entire area, if deployed as one system.”

Chief Kenley notes, “The draft report from Citygate in 2011 also recommends a boundary drop.”

The problem is that they have never been deployed as one system.  Instead, city of Davis units respond first to city calls for services.

Chief Kenley notes, “It is somewhat baffling that as early as 1993, the parties have received information and/or agreed that it makes sense to drop the boundaries between the agencies, yet to date, the UC Davis Engine at their headquarters station is not included in any first alarm response within the Davis City limits.”

One possible missing piece to Chief Kenley’s puzzle may clearly be the resistance by the Davis Firefighters Union, led by Bobby Weist.

“We moved in the correct direction when UC Fire signed an agreement with the City of Davis for dispatching. However, as stated above, we have not moved towards closest unit response,” a source told the Vanguard.

One of the reasons that this change has not occurred is that Bobby Weist is dead set against it, apparently viewing a UC Davis fire response to calls within the city as taking away work from his own membership.

Several sources have in the past told the Vanguard that Mr. Weist has acknowledged that he does not care about customer service –  that what he cares about is protecting his own turf and that this wall will never be torn down.

“We need to change this attitude. We need to send the closest available resource to the emergency,” a source said, noting that the typical customer does not care if they are assisted by a city unit or a UC unit.

Chief Kenley’s report pushes the city back in the direction of a boundary drop.  He argues that, while every study describes the two departments as being “multifaceted with often-divergent missions … at the core level of the delivery of services, the departments are very similar.”

He adds, “In reality, with respect to the delivery of fire and life safety services, they are the same.”

Chief Kenley writes, “The only impact the ‘multifaceted with often-divergent missions’ has on the delivery of fire and life safety services is at the administrative level of the two agencies. It is not impossible for a combined administrative structure that oversees the fire suppression services of both agencies to address the impacts of the ‘multifaceted with often-divergent missions’ of both agencies.”

Chief Kenley notes that while the department has a minimum staffing of 12 personnel daily, that does not include the additional staffing at Station 34 – staffed with UC Davis Fire personnel.

In 1999, the department “convinced the City Council at the time that four person staffing was needed to meet the new OSHA standard of two-in; two-out.”

Chief Kenley notes that, since that time, “at least four previous studies have justified the need for the four person staffing, in part because of the linear shape of the City’s boundaries and history of simultaneous calls.”

Chief Kenley notes that each of the previous studies assumed only the three stations within the city limits of Davis and “none of the studies considered the inclusion of Engine Thirty-four, the UC Davis engine stationed within a mile of the City’s Station Thirty-one.”

UC Davis becomes the lynch pin to the belief that the city could reduce its fire staffing without significant additional risk.

Chief Kenley writes, “A review of the past three years’ (Fiscal Years) responses reveals that out of fifteen working structure fires (five per year), a maximum of two had the potential for a delayed interior attack. In one of the incidents reviewed, the attack was made from the exterior by the first arriv[ing] engine company, therefore, two-in; two-out was not an issue.”

Chief Kenley describes an incident that he observed in August 2012 just three blocks from Station 32, where Engine 32 was on scene within seconds from leaving the station.

“If this fire had occurred with three person staffing, the first arriving engine would have had to either wait outside and wait for the arrival of the second engine or duty chief before they could make entry or attack the fire from the garage door area,” the Chief describes. “Since it would not have been a good public relations move to stand by waiting for the second engine or duty chief, so the appropriate action would be to attack the fire from the garage door area, risking spreading the fire through the house if the kitchen door were left open or had burned through in the fire.”

This is where the typical anecdotal analysis by fire personnel usually ends.  But Chief Kenley’s analysis shows in the end, it probably would not have mattered.

As he summarizes, “Regardless of whether or not the attack would have resulted in greater fire damage to the interior of the house, it appears that the demolition process would have been the same.”

“If the only justification for four person staffing is the ability to make an interior attack on a structure fire with the first arriving engine, a case could be made that the cost of maintaining four person staffing is not offset by the reduction in fire loss or the cost of rebuilding,” Chief Kenley analyzes.

He argues a four-person crew can perform typical tasks about 20 to 30 seconds faster than a three-person crew.

The question to be answered is, “Is it cost effective to maintain four-person staffing in order to reduce the time it takes to perform a task by twenty to thirty seconds?”

Currently, the department can amass sixteen firefighting personnel at the scene of a structure fire. If the engine company staffing were reduced to three persons at two stations, the on-scene staffing would be reduced to fourteen, he continues.

But an alternative would be to dispatch Engine 34 on the initial first alarm response.  This would result in 17 firefighters on scene, one more than the current sixteen.  Chief Kenley argues, “Given that over the past three years a working structure fire occurs on average five to six times per year, the risk of tying up all five units is minimal.”

In short, through the utilization of UC Davis into a fire response plan, the chief believes that the reduction of fire personnel can be achieved without much additional risk.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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