Firefighters typically respond four or five times during a 24-hour shift, “especially on medical calls,” noted Chief Skeels. “Many of those are resolved when you get there; they don’t require action after all but you never know until you arrive on scene.”But things might heat up for the fire department in the coming months, the worst of the fire season. “Late September, early October are our worst time for brush fires,” said Chief Skeels. “I want to encourage people to be extra careful; people have done a very good about weed abatement,” with a scant list of property owners that didn’t comply.“The city ended up having to contract out to remove the weeds from two properties, down quite a bit from previous years. People have complied very well,” Chief Skeels noted.
Santa Paula Fire Department: Calls for service often medical emergencies
September 15, 1999
Santa Paula News
Although Santa Paula had just a handful of serious structure fires during the fiscal year, there were plenty of calls for service, 1,739 in all, a majority of them for emergency medical incidents, according to Chief Paul Skeels.
The city’s fiscal year ended June 30th.From January 1, 1999 through the end of June, there were 66 fives, five of which were serious structure fires. The Santa Paula Fire Department also responded to 16 false alarms, 82 mutual aid calls of all kinds, two minor hazardous materials emergencies and 570 “other incidents” ranging from vehicle and other accidents as well as public service requests.The bulk of the department’s runs were emergency medical and rescue incidents, 1,003 calls for such service in all during the fiscal year ending June 30th.Updated statistics starting July 1 and ending “this morning” i.e. Sept. 8, showed 311 emergency calls, “two months and one week into the new fiscal year,” noted Chief Skeels.So far this calendar year there has been 1,210 calls for emergency service.The new fiscal year has had two serious structure fires that potentially could have been much worse, Chief Skeels added: One was July 5th, a stove top fire in a residence on Marin Street that caused about $1,000 damage to contents and the structure. The second was August 15th on North 14th Street, a bedroom fire that caused about $2,000 in damage.“Obviously, these were bad for those that had the fire incidents but fortunately they weren’t worse.”A “great deal” of SPFD emergency calls are for medically related, about two-thirds of the total responses. Mixed in are a variety of other calls ranging from vehicle and vegetation fires to arcing or down electrical wires.
