For skid row firefighters, little time to breathe
skid row.
Returning to the station, Gibson trudged back to the stove.
“I hope they didn’t burn anything,” he said, knowing that he’d hear it if his fellow firefighters weren’t pleased with their burritos. “All right,” he said a few minutes later, “breakfast is ready. Come and get it.”
The station’s 19-member C shift — all of them men — assembled in the kitchen. Capt. Larry Salas ran through the schedule for the week.
It’s a challenge to keep Station No. 9 fully staffed. Some firefighters blame the stigma of homelessness in their district. The volume of calls and the intensity of the work mean firefighters looking for easy overtime aren’t flocking there.
As a result, on the day The Times visited, one firefighter was working for his fifth straight day.
After roll call, Robles, the station’s longtime leader, took over the meeting. An affable and stocky man, he is part father and part camp counselor to his cohort of younger firefighters, who are intensely loyal to him.
“We’re going to go to the Hotel Baltimore and throw the stick,” he told the team, referring to practice climbing the ladder. “Everyone is going to climb the stick and work our way down.”
Next to speak is Tony Navarro, who, as the most senior member of Station No. 9, is the bull firefighter. He has been at the station for 11 years; before working there, he’d never seen skid row.
On his first day, Navarro responded to a medical call to find a man without feet in a wheelchair. His legs were wrapped in plastic, and maggots were eating away the flesh underneath. When he and other firefighters pulled the man out of his chair, they found that his whole backside was raw and maggots were crawling over his body, top to bottom.
“It smelled like a dead body,” Navarro said. “That was my first day, and it was all downhill from there.”
Burnout is the biggest enemy of trying to be an effective firefighter at Station No. 9, he said. The constant calls, constant horror and constant fatigue add up to high turnover. He recalled dozing off at the wheel several times on his commute home. More than once, he said, California Highway Patrol officers pulled him over.
These days, Navarro said, he finds time to kick his feet up and clear his head by sleeping for a few minutes or watching a movie. Finding those quiet moments is important, he said. Otherwise you won’t make it through the day — physically or emotionally.
For many members of the station, responding to calls in ambulances is the hardest part. “You’re inundated with patients,” Navarro said. “It gets to you.”
Of Station No. 9’s roughly 22,800 emergency calls last year, about 18,850 were medical, according to the LAFD.
“Half of us wouldn’t want to be here if it was just that,” Navarro said.
9:46 a.m.: 501 S. Los Angeles St., Baltimore Hotel
Two engines and one ladder pull out of Station No. 9 and enter the heat and traffic of a Saturday morning in downtown Los Angeles. The long truck comes to a stop on 5th Street and blocks a lane of traffic.
The truck’s ladder rises and settles next to the building’s roof. The men line up to climb and discuss how to carry gear up the ladder.
“The most dangerous part is the transition,” Navarro says.
Two years ago, during a training exercise at a building a lot like the Baltimore Hotel, a member of Station No. 9 — Kelly Wong — lost his footing and fell from the ladder onto a firetruck below. He died two days later.
Firefighters are quick to say they do this work for guys like Wong, whose photo is everywhere in the station. They’re less willing to talk about what happened on that day.
Soriano, the apparatus operator, worked the same shift as Wong but was off the day his colleague fell. He had been driving to a wine festival with his girlfriend but turned around and headed to the hospital when he heard what had happened.
“A lot of the guys were really good friends with Kelly. Seeing them broken was terrible. If we don’t get an opportunity to practice this scenario,” he said, referring to climbing the ladder, “we’ll be in trouble when there’s a more stressful scenario when someone is hanging out a window and a fire is blazing. We have to do it, man. We do it in memory of him.”
Soriano has been with the LAFD for 13 years and with Station No. 9 for four years. After responding to dozens of calls for several days in a row, the grim nature of the work sometimes blurs together.
“It wears on your patience, because a lot of the homeless people, we know them by name, and they’re doing the same thing over and over,” he said. “We take a guy to the hospital and he’ll be right back out at 2 p.m. There’s a shock when you first get there and you have to learn how to deal with that over and over again.”
Embracing stoicism, Soriano said, helps him deal with the perpetual stress.
1:38 p.m.: 300 Santa Fe Ave.
Firetrucks and an ambulance scream through skid row on their way to an apartment building. A man has fallen six floors after taking a wrong step while fixing an HVAC system on the roof.
The firefighters find him moaning , face down in a pool of blood. His arms and legs point in unnatural directions.
Gibson runs over and kneels down, attempting to get a pulse and sense of the severity of the man’s injuries. The man’s moans grow louder as the firefighters contemplate how to get him onto a gurney.
“It’s going to be uncomfortable no matter what,” Gibson says, cutting off the man’s shirt.
Another firefighter grabs him by his pants and helps flip him over.
“He broke a lot of things,” Gibson says.
6 p.m.: A quiet moment
As 6 p.m. approached, Gibson prepared dinner. While waiting, firefighters cleaned the station, tinkered with faltering exhaust pipes and examined a new ram bar, a firefighting tool for
breaking through locks, doors and walls.
In this quiet moment, Michael Villata, an 11-year LAFD veteran, said he’s often thinking about the disorder that surrounds Station No. 9.
He said he and his colleagues know rising rents have contributed to the growing number of people living on the street. But he also blames the nexus of mental illness and drug abuse, and what he sees as a hesitancy among L.A. police officers to deal with homeless people and their encampments.
In some cases, Villata speculated, the breakdown of families has left people without the support they need to be successful in life.
Skid row can be dangerous. Firefighters said they have been threatened while responding to calls. Homeless people have brandished knives, and others have picked up shovels to swing at them.
“We’ve been punched, spit at, choked,” Robles said.
Specific procedures for dealing with such incidents exist, but they still happen often enough that firefighters say they worry about ending up in a violent confrontation when responding to calls. It doesn’t stop them from caring for people on skid row, though.
Villata said he tries to support homeless people — one man in particular, who goes by the name Mango and lives in a tent across the street from Station No. 9.
Mango moved to Los Angeles from Florida and has become the firefighters’ greatest champion — often wearing a T-shirt or a hat with Station No. 9’s logo. Sometimes he helps clean up after a fire is extinguished, and when gear gets stolen from trucks, Mango is usually the one who will venture out to find it.
More often, he stops by just to hang out and talk with the firefighters.
Over the summer, Villata rebuilt Mango’s motorbike, but it was stolen days after he delivered it.
“When I gave him the bike, he cried. He was really happy…. I saw him a few days later and he was devastated that it got stolen,” Villata said. “I just felt horrible for Mango because of how grateful and happy he was. To have something taken from him — just watching it sucks.”
6:48 p.m.: Station No. 9 TV room
Navarro’s feet are up and his eyelids are drooping. A movie is playing on the big screen as a homeless man walks into the station.
“If I could just get some sleeping pills,” he says.
The man’s thumb is nearly ripped off, pointing in an odd direction.
The man explains how he recently had surgery and how he had taken the cast off prematurely because his hand hurt. He also tells firefighters that he missed a follow-up appointment with a doctor.
“We don’t have any,” firefighter Eric Shinn tells him. “Go to the drugstore and get some NyQuil maybe. You can’t be missing appointments.”
Shinn wraps the man’s hand and finds a piece of cardboard to fashion a makeshift splint.
The man leaves.
Such grim scenes drive firefighters to find ways to escape and relax. They pull lots of pranks on one another — like a seemingly serious “training session” ordered by Robles. It turned out to be a younger firefighter swinging nunchaku as his colleagues broke down in laughter.
There’s lots of amusement in these moments — a brief respite from what’s happening outside.
Station No. 9’s members are a tightknit crew. They vacation together. Their families grill together. Soriano recently led a crew of his fellow firefighters on a snowboarding trip to Austria. They also went to Chile and Japan.
“There’s a brotherhood that you can’t really speak about unless you have been there,” Soriano said. “We’re involved in each other’s lives. We hang out with our girlfriends and wives. We go on trips, and we have a lot of fun at the station.”
Another way firefighters let off steam is to play handball. It’s the LAFD’s official sport, and tournaments often attract oldtimers who worked at the station decades ago. Sometimes they play in their socks to decide who will do dishes after dinner.
While a game was underway, Soriano and Robles sat in the kitchen and discussed how firefighters were adjusting to life at Station No. 9. Some were struggling with how much time they had to spend responding to medical calls.
It’s common during the first year working on skid row for some firefighters to be sick all the time until their bodies adjust to the stress. Firefighters often spend their first year battling colds and feeling generally unwell.
“It’s something like your freshman 15,” Soriano said, comparing it to the belief that many college students gain weight in their first year.
He blamed it on the lack of sleep and unceasing exposure to the generally unhealthy environment of skid row.
“The hotels, the tents — it’s not necessarily the most clean place to operate,” Soriano said. “I got sick. It’s not like you’re throwing up. You’re just sick constantly.”
11:38 p.m.: 118 E. 6th St., Cole’s French Dip
Engine 209 pulls out of the station, and Mango steps into the street to block traffic. This happens a lot.
Firefighters arrive at Cole’s French Dip and find a man flat on the ground. Patrons are standing around, wondering what’s happening.
Villata digs into the man’s pocket and finds a needle. His pupils are uneven.
They give him a dose of naloxone and his vitals return to normal. “Let’s go,” Capt. Jim Duffy yells. “Captain is tired,” Gibson says to no one in particular.
4:47 a.m.: 1301 N. Main St.
Chatter over the radio alerts Station No. 9 to a fire in a neighboring district. Firefighters arrive to find an abandoned building, flames erupting from its mezzanine.
Robles grabs a saw to cut holes in the wall and ceiling. Soriano grabs a fan. They move room to room, putting out remnants of the conflagration.
Navarro pulls off his breathing mask.
There were 82 incidents in 24 hours. Navarro had just worked 72 hours. Robles was scheduled to do another shift.
When the firefighters return to Station No. 9, the A shift has already arrived and is getting situated. Mango is outside grilling food that he intends to sell. Another day at the busiest fire station in Los Angeles has begun.