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Budget cuts and fire engine brown-out significant factor in Oak Park blaze
by Ed Fogle, published on June 9, 2012 at 3:32 AM
Storyline: Breaking and Action News Stories
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Sacramento, CA | When a fire truck crew arrived on scene of a house ablaze Thursday afternoon, they had to wait for an engine with water to arrive from a distance.
Thursday afternoon, Sacramento firefighters were called out to a blaze in the Oak Park area. When Truck 6 arrived in three minutes (trucks carry no water) the structure was fully involved with fire. The first engine, Engine 10 (carrying water), arrived in 6-8 minutes; Engine 6 (who likely would have arrived with Truck 6) was browned out due to budget cuts.
Fortunately this was an unoccupied home which had burned a couple of years ago but had not been torn down. Chief Chris Ortiz explained that fire grows exponentially and literally doubles itself every minute. Had this been an occupied home, given the brown-out delayed first in engine with water, the difference of minutes is very significant.
The fire was so burning so hot that surrounding homes, called exposures, had to be protected from radiant heat so they would not catch fire as well.
I asked Chief Ortiz about the City’s “Dangerous Building” organization that is supposed to tear down structures such as this when the fire occurred a couple of years ago. Ortiz stated that he called for “Dangerous Buildings” to respond; his dispatch advised him that “Dangerous Buildings” would not respond. Ortiz stated that he could not divulge the reason.
There were no injuries in this blaze and the cause remains under investigation.
Battalion Chief, Chris Ortiz, talks about the incident...
Defensive 2 Story Structure Fire, June 7, 2012 Oak Park, CA from SacMav Rapid Media on Vimeo.
Image by: SacMav.com | Ed Fogle
Image by: SacMav.com
Image by: MaverickPhotography.us
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It appears Sacramento is becoming Detroit, lacking the pride to bother to tear down burnt out structures.
Maybe we could stop funneling our taxes to the pension plans of the select few who are on public employee-extortion train.
Carus Ray Mayor of Oak Park !
Well - I'll tell you why city Dangerous Buildings did not show up - Because it is in the county - Duh! Someone better inform Mr. Ortiz that while his dept serves this area as part of a contract with the Fruitridge Fire District, city departments do not have such a contract with the district or the county and therefore, city employees don't have jurisdiction or duty in such an instance.
It ticks me off when the fire dept spews bad information and points fingers at a another city department, especially when they have no idea what they are talking about. SFD needs to go back to a professional PIO.
According to KCRA's reporting, "The complex is located on the corner of 16th and East Nichols avenues. It has caught fire before and was boarded up"
A quick check of jurisdictional boundaries shows this to be in the unincorporated county...not the city. The specific address, acording to the Assessor's parcel viewer, is 4120 E Nichols Ave.
So why didn't Ortiz just state that? Instead "Ortiz stated that he could not divulge the reason." What a crock....the fact that this is county property is privileged information?
Perhaps the author should clarify the situation, now that more complete information is present....that should have been the case from the start.
The Water, Fire and Park Districts are case in point. See the maps attached to this report from
Sac LAFCO (Sacramento Local Area Formation Commission).
http://www.saclafco.org/coswcms/groups/public/@wcm/@pub/@lafco/@inter/documents/webcontent/sac_008358.pdf
There are some aspects of municipal services that the city is better equiped to handle and code enforcement and building inspection is one of them. Perhaps the city and county should look at consolodating in these areas and thereby, eliminating this kind of confusion. Police is another one, as SPD spends a lot of time crossing over to the county.