Last week, Arizona residents saw some of the worst flooding in years. Out of 15 counties in the state, 10 were declared emergencies. Lives were lost, including that of a 6-year-old Phoenix boy who drowned in swiftwater. At the same time, just this month the state’s fire marshal office was forced to shut its door as a result of budget cuts.
Specifically, Arizona’s Office of State Fire Marshal released a memo based on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mandate that every city department cut 15% from its budget and eliminate programs not mandated by statue, said Arizona Fire Chief Association’s Executive Director Ron Dennis. He said as an example, the fire marshal’s office is required by statute to inspect schools but is not mandated to oversee firefighter training. As a result, statewide certification programs were suspended, including Firefighter I and II certification and instructor and fire inspector training.
Having fewer firefighters trained is a concern of Dennis, and the AFCA is setting up task forces to determine how training programs will continue going forward.
But his immediate concern is that the fire marshal office also fired the fire resource coordinator and announced it would no longer centrally track and coordinate statewide mutual-aid resources. Dennis said the statewide mutual-aid program has a memorandum of understanding with the AFCA that the office will support the resource tracking in the state and staff the emergency operations center if there is a major emergency. The loss of the coordinator left fire chiefs without access to a resource database and without an ability to update it or use it for statewide deployment. In addition, the database wasn’t 100% complete and is now “dead in the water,” he said.
“We don’t have access to the database and we don’t have anyone to get that database up to speed like we need it to be,” Dennis said.
The bottleneck will cripple state- and countywide mutual-aid operations, Dennis said. That doesn’t apply to the current storm the state faces, because a state emergency was declared so resources are coordinated by FEMA through a number of city and county emergency operating centers.
“The good news as that each county has a resource coordinator, and we will be relying on them through direct contact to assist us,” Dennis said.
The next step Dennis said is for AFCA members to draft a transition plan to deal with the cutbacks, but it is going to take a few months to complete. It will be spearheaded by a mutual-aid task force, which will determine who gets called to staff the EOC during statewide emergencies. In addition, the database must somehow be transferred to the division of emergency management and updates completed.
“We have a plan but right now we have lots of hurdles to jump to get our mutual-aid program back on track,” he said. “The big thing is that if there is a disaster, who gets called to the EOC and so we have to figure out who is available and who is qualified.”
In the meantime, staffing the fire side is a problem. So Dennis currently is at the Arizona state emergency operations center to help coordinate the AFCA’s role for the current state-wide emergency.
“Right in the middle of this, I ended up going to the emergency operations center and working as the fire resources coordinator with no resource database,” Dennis said, noting that he couldn’t provide fire resource data to federal officials when they asked for it.
For Dennis and the state of Arizona, federal resources saved their skin during the current storm. But if statewide fire resources were really needed, “We would have been in big, big trouble,” Dennis said.
Related link:
