Nearly 50 percent of calls to the Salinas Fire Department are related to homelessness.

The two captains, two firefighters, a firefighter-in-training and a paramedic at Salinas Fire Station One – one of the busiest in the city – were divided between a fire engine and a fire truck.

Midday on Friday, July 2, both vehicles were on the road for more than three hours responding to a variety of incidents, from medical emergencies to small fires to reports of noisy power lines. By 9pm, both crews had attended at least eight calls each, making it a busy day.

Tim Makanani is part of the fire truck crew – he works as a tillerman, the crew member who sits on the back of the ladder truck. The fire engine crew’s most important task is making sure there is ventilation during a structure fire, opening a building’s roof, for example, so smoke can pour out.

Makanani says that over the course of two days, June 30 and July 1, they had 36 medical calls, not including fires, accidents or power lines, “which is a lot for a city of our size.”

When he got hired in 2017, there were four people per fire truck. Since 2018 they have been working with a team of three.

“We had the ability to split crews, which means two can go to the roof, say to go vent, and the other two, we can go in for search,” Makanani says. “[Now] we can’t split, we have to wait now for our second truck.”

Fire Chief Michele Vaughn says one less person has changed the way they deploy “that leaves less apparatuses to run other calls that are happening simultaneously in the city.”

Vaughn says this change happened because in 2018, the department was understaffed and firefighters were working overtime. Then-City Manager Ray Corpuz and Fire Chief Jeff Johnson agreed to staff fire trucks with three firefighters. The department will start a two-month fire academy on July 12 and they are planning to hire 13 firefighters to fill these and upcoming vacancies.

But firefighters are getting busier everyday, and at least some of the reason is due to fires started in homeless encampments. In 2020, SFD attended 7,255 calls from Jan. 1 through the weekend of July Fourth (during the three-month period when shelter-in-place started, they saw a decline in calls). In 2021 year-to-date, they responded to 7,881 calls. Vaughn says they are predicting between 17,000 to 18,000 calls this year.

At least 50 percent of the calls SFD gets are related to unsheltered people and homeless encampments.

“We are going to fires every single day,” Vaughn says, and adds many of them happen because unsheltered people cook in areas where materials such as grass, paper or tents can fuel a fire and cause it to spread.

During a 24-hour period, from midnight July 4 to midnight July 5, SFD responded to 85 calls, including small fires and medical calls from people suffering anxiety and PTSD from the fireworks.

On June 22, Mayor Kimbley Craig reported that SFD attended 19 vegetation fires at homeless encampments and structure fires in the previous week. After coming out of the pandemic, Craig says now is the time to look at quality-of-life issues.

If the fire department needs more personnel, “We’d have to figure out where it comes from in the budget, which means something else might get cut or something else might get rearranged,” Craig says.