Save Seal Beach’s Reserve Firefighters

Re “Fire Directors OK With Retooling Volunteers,” Feb. 7:

The Orange County Fire Authority has presented a lot of statistics that show the volunteer/reserve firefighters are not needed and not relied upon as front-line units. Here in Seal Beach, this is simply not true.

For political reasons, Villa Park, Sunset Beach and the canyon stations get to keep their engines. The program admittedly has problems in other parts of the county, but it works here and has since 1928.

They tell you the reserves are undertrained, yet they have put on only a handful of weekend training classes over the past three years and not allowed them to hire new volunteers. The authority is ending the service of 18 emergency units altogether, and six units in this part of the county.

Seal Beach volunteer firefighters spend three hours a week training and make it to about 90% of the calls they are dispatched to.

Don’t fall for the statistical manipulation. In some cases they will show that they never made it on-scene, but this is because they either get canceled due to no emergency or a pager malfunction. Very rarely do they not have enough manpower to get our emergency units out.

Almost any time a large incident has occurred throughout the county, most likely a Seal Beach volunteer firefighter was there to help.

Nate Kranda

Seal Beach