Stalled fire agreement could save lives

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - It’s been talked about for years, and despite the fact that it could save lives, nothing has been done.

“I think there’s a little bit of frustration on everybody’s part that it hasn’t happened yet,” Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart-Stebbins said at a recent commission meeting.

At issue is an agreement between the Albuquerque Fire Department and the Bernalillo County Fire Department that would erase jurisdictional boundaries and send the closest available firefighters to emergency calls.

“If my child stops breathing and I call 911, I want someone there as fast as humanly possible,” Hart-Stebbins said.

The idea is that when a call comes into 911, firefighters from the closest county or city fire station should respond regardless of where the call comes from. Sometimes it happens, but often it doesn’t.

Take, for example, a car crash with injuries that occurred at Dennis Chavez and Unser boulevards in southwest Albuquerque late last year.

A county fire station was just 1.2 miles from the crash, but the call was instead routed to a city fire station 3.5 miles away. City firefighters took eight minutes and 30 seconds to arrive on scene.

County firefighters told News 13 they could arrived at least six minutes earlier.

Less than five minutes after that crash, 911 operators received another call from a home on Dona ñAvelina in the city of Albuquerque for a 1-year-old child having trouble breathing.

Once again, the call went to a city fire station 3.1 miles away. And, once again, a county fire station was closer – just two miles away.

The child was OK, but the difference in response time was about 3 1/2 minutes.

A firefighter union official told News 13 that coming to an agreement has been unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming.

“The citizens of Bernalillo County and the city of Albuquerque deserve better,” said Robert Sanchez, vice president of the Albuquerque Area Firefighters Union. “This is an issue that this union has been working on for well over a decade now.”

City councilors and county commissioners have been pushing for an agreement too. In fact, late last year, the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County government commission gave the two fire chiefs a deadline of next month to reach an agreement.

However, city Chief James Breen and county Chief John Garcia said that establishing a formal agreement is a complex process.

“This is new ground,” Breen said. “It’s never been done before at this level.”

Breen said he couldn’t say why the agreement hasn’t been done before.

“Maybe it was jurisdictions not working together,” he said.

Said Garcia, “I couldn’t really tell you (why). It’s always been an issue of we know what needs to happen, but it’s always trying to get everybody on the same page.”

The first step is to figure out how to better dispatch calls from the agencies’ separate dispatch centers because both use different systems, the chiefs said. Last month, the chiefs issued a memo to dispatchers to try and start streamlining the dispatch process in the meantime.

Still, the two chiefs insist a formal agreement will be in place soon, possibly as early as April.

Hart-Stebbins said it’s time to put public safety first.

“To most people, it seems like a pretty simple, common-sense thing to do,” she said.