ANSWER: A minimum of one fire company and one paramedic resource are assigned to each fire station service district. The basic building blocks are the engine company and the Paramedic/Ambulance.

All fire stations will be realigned into two Divisions each responsible for seven Battalions. In addition, ten Staff Assistant positions each day, or a total of 30 positions, will be reassigned. The remaining two Division SA’s and seven Battalion SA’s will be redeployed as Emergency Incident Technicians, or E-I-T’s. Both Division offices and seven of the Battalion offices will have E-I-T’s as part of their Command Teams. One EMS Captain will be added to bring the daily on-duty total to seven. These Captains will be realigned with the remaining seven Battalion Commanders. The EMS Captains will function as part of the Battalion Command Team, with the primary responsibility of providing supervision and oversight of emergency medical service resources.

The Deployment Plan realigns our response footprint to better support our EMS calls. The LAFD’s emergency responses are now at an all-time high, with an average of 85% of our calls being medical in nature. As a result, our mix of ambulances and assessment companies will be adjusted to meet this extremely high EMS call load. The Department will deploy 79 paramedic ambulances, 43 BLS ambulances and 21 Ready Reserve ambulances across the City. Our assessment (Paramedic assigned) companies will increase from 62 to 82.

This realignment will permit us to suspend staffing for seven Light Forces and 11 Engines. However, these apparatus will not be removed from any fire station, and every station will remain open with the response capabilities described herein. The staffing from these 18 companies will be used to fill vacant positions, thereby greatly reducing what the city’s budget refers to as “compensated time off.”

This new Deployment Plan will permit us to permanently terminate the Modified Coverage Plan (MCP). See the section on the MCP. Overall, the new Deployment Plan will protect every existing firefighter’s job, will keep every fire station open, will provide a fire suppression resource and a paramedic in every service district, and will create a stable operational model that will help ensure firefighter and civilian safety, while cutting more than $200 million dollars from the existing department budget over three years.

The Plan will officially go into effect on July 5, 2011.

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