Fire crew change to help Rancho Bernardo response times

The assignment of a brush engine to San Pasqual Valley is good news for Rancho Bernardo’s fire and medical response times, city officials said.

Starting Friday, San Diego Fire-Rescue will have a 12-hour, four-person crew staff a modified brush engine housed in a Cal Fire facility near San Pasqual Academy. The engine is coming from Fire Station No. 33 in Rancho Bernardo.

RB’s station will receive a state-owned brush engine from another station in the city while its engine is used in San Pasqual for the next four to six months, said Fire Chief Brian Fennessy.

A brush engine is designed for use on grass fires and is specially adapted to fire fighting in rough terrain where fire hydrants are few or non-existent, according to the city’s website. It can carry 600 to 1,500 gallons of water and sometimes has foam that can deeply penetrate brush.

“We are excited to be able to have an engine in the valley to jump on vegetation fires and provide advanced life support that has been missing in the valley up to this point,” he said.

This is the first time money has been allocated to have a crew stationed in San Pasqual. Until now, whenever an incident occurred in the city’s northern-most area, the closest San Diego Fire-Rescue team was Rancho Bernardo’s, which meant Station No. 33 has an almost 26-square-mile coverage area, the largest in the city, Fennessy said.

Whenever Station No. 33 responded to a brush fire, traffic accident or medical call in San Pasqual, which includes the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, another community’s firefighters and paramedics had to respond if during the RB crew’s absence an emergency occurred in Rancho Bernardo.

Fennessy said when factoring in travel time — especially during rush hour along Interstate 15 — the Rancho Bernardo crew could be outside its community for a few hours, depending upon the type of call. So response times for RB emergencies increased as crews responded from Carmel Mountain Ranch, Rancho Penasquitos, Poway or 4S Ranch. The latter two, part of the Poway Fire Department and Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, respectively, respond to City of San Diego incidents through a mutual aid agreement.

He said sometimes an Escondido crew responded to San Pasqual. The dispatch system knows the location of every crew countywide and calls for the nearest crew to an emergency. Despite Escondido being closer, RB’s station has often responded to San Pasqual because of availability.

As fire officials have often said for every additional minute it takes for fire and paramedic crews to respond, the higher the likelihood of an unfavorable outcome. Their standard goal is to respond within 7 minutes, 30 seconds.

“(San Pasqual) is an area of the city that most locals know has been grossly underserved, largely because its response volume has been fairly low compared to other areas of the city that are far more dense,” Fennessy said.

The chief said because the city owns the engine and equipment — life-saving medical equipment is not typical on a brush engine, but being added to expand the San Pasqual crew’s capabilities — and Cal Fire is not charging for use of the building, the only additional cost is personnel. A four-person crew working a 12-hour shift will cost $386,158 over the next four months. If it stays five months, the cost will be $480,343 and if its stays all six months it will be $577,678.

He said the money is part of the department’s annual budget, which goes into effect Friday. The city did not allocate additional money for the San Pasqual crew, but the department reshuffled its allocation to cover the expense.

Fennessy said the goal is to have the San Pasqual crew in place during peak fire season since that is when it will be needed most. The crew will work daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., when historically most calls have come in. He also said having a crew in the area is crucial at this time since the recent El Niño rains created a lot of now-dry brush and the 2007 Guejito fire began in the San Pasqual Valley. The wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes in Rancho Bernardo and Poway and merged with the Witch Creek fire that started hours earlier east of Ramona.

While this is not a pilot program — like San Diego Fire-Rescue’s two-person Fast Response Team the department recently tested in some underserved parts of the city — Fennessy said officials will review data over the next few months to see if they can request funding for an all-year San Pasqual crew. Among factors will be response time improvements in San Pasqual and Rancho Bernardo.

“We will go back and evaluate the number of responses for the brush rig and time 33 is in service (in RB),” he said. “We are stressing the impact on wildland fires and advanced life support services.”

City Councilman Mark Kersey, who represents both communities, said having a crew in San Pasqual is something he has advocated since entering office in 2012.

“The fire chief deserves all kinds of credit for this because he really understands the threat fires pose and importance of having resources in the back country,” Kersey said.