Mere days after Flashlight reported last week that rebel firefighters had taken to Facebook and Twitter to report to the public which stations and apparatus were affected by the rolling closures meant to ease the budget deficit, the Sullivan administration announced layoffs across the city’s departments. They included eight positions at the fire department, along with seven more empty fire positions that won’t be filled.

Meanwhile the same person responsible for the Facebook and Twitter accounts, who posts under “AFD status,” launched a blog at afdstatus.wordpress.com, which thus far explains for the lay person what it means if an engine or a tender is closed. A recent post, for example, reads, “A majority of the Engines are staffed with at least one Paramedic. By having Paramedics on Engines, the AFD has the ability to provide a higher level of Advanced Life Support care to the community then you would find in cities where fire departments do not provide Emergency Medical Services. Having medically trained personnel on the Engines is a major reason that Anchorage has a higher cardiac arrest survival rate (38%) than many other places, well above the national average of 7%.”

Though the blog and the social media accounts haven’t directly criticized the Sullivan administration for its cuts to the fire department, the department’s personnel aren’t happy. At a recent breakfast promoting a program to teach CPR to middle school students across the state, a paramedic told Flashlight the event was a bright spot in a sea of darkness for the department. Layoff notices were handed out between last Friday and Tuesday at the department, including AFD’s three safety officers.

“The notion that we just have jobs around here with people sitting around is insane,” Tom Wescott, president of the Anchorage firefighters union, tells Flashlight. And, he says, the combination of the layoffs and the rolling closures absolutely means a reduction in service. He gives the example of a cardiac arrest call that came in from a residence near the fire station at Tudor and Baxter Roads. Its engine, number 14, was closed due to the rolling closures, so a tender responded instead. The response time was good, as good as it would be with the engine, but the reality is that a tender has one person who’s an EMT, while the engine would have four personnel, one of whom is a paramedic. “So on paper it says somebody got on-scene this fast,” Wescott says. “But when you dig deeper you see that it was one person—they don’t have the capabilities of a four-man engine company with a paramedic and all the drugs and monitors he would have. That’s not what showed up.”

Wescott says that the layoffs of the public safety officers “basically eliminated the safety program.” Now, rather than having a safety officer respond to emergencies such as structure fires and auto extrications, captains and senior captains will be responsible for their duties, which means that an additional rig will be sent to those scenes, further lessening the number of apparatus available for other emergencies. A slew of other responsibilities the safety officers had, like facility inspections and health and wellness management, will likely fall by the wayside, according to Wescott. “It won’t get done,” he says.

Mayor Dan Sullivan has defended the cuts, noting in an interview with KTUU that the fire department took budget reduction of less than 1 percent. When confronted with a statement he’d made during his mayoral campaign promising to fully fund public safety and cut other departments first, Sullivan told KTUU that the additional nine million dollar deficit his administration found “really took campaign rhetoric off the table and came into the reality of dealing with a budget situation that we inherited.” Sullivan also said they didn’t think there would be any diminishment in public safety response.

The campaign rhetoric remark is “one of the things that disturbed me most,” Wescott says. “[Sullivan’s] gotten on the news and said, ‘the chief assures me this is not a reduction in service’—it’s almost like he’s looking for someone to blame if something bad happens.” Wescott would prefer that Sullivan admitted it was a tough cut to make, but he was confident in the department’s ability to perform. “I could live with that a little more than what he is saying. It’s hard to dispute that if you take away 10 percent or 15 percent of the fire department any given day that it’s not a reduction. And if it’s not a reduction, hey, let’s get rid of them full time.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com