Main Street

Crisis

To roads being turned to gravel, senior year of high school being made optional, public bus systems being shut down and libraries being closed, add another effect of state and municipal budget crises: firehouse brownouts.

Fire departments that can’t keep all their units open at any one time are instituting “rolling brownouts,” in which today the firehouse down the block from me might be closed and tomorrow it will be open while the one in your neighborhood across town will be closed. According to the New York Times, this is increasingly widespread—the article mentions Philadelphia, Baltimore, Sacramento, San Diego.

Firehouse closures don’t just affect the response time for fires. Increasingly, emergency medical response teams are part of fire departments, so people in cities with brownouts don’t just have to worry about facing a relatively rare fire. Much more common medical emergencies are suddenly a far graver concern: A heart attack, a fall down the stairs, being hit by a car. Or choking:

The risks of cutting fire service were driven home here last month when Bentley Do, a 2-year-old boy who was visiting relatives, somehow got his hands on a gum ball, put it in his mouth, started laughing and then began choking.

“It blocked the air hole,” said his uncle, Brian Do, who called 911 while other relatives frantically tried to dislodge the gum ball. “No air could flow in and out.”

It is only 600 steps from the front door of the neatly kept stucco home where the boy was staying to the nearest fire station, just down the block. But the station was empty that evening: its engine was in another part of town, on a call in an area usually covered by an engine that had been taken out of service as part of a brownout plan.

The police came to the home within five minutes and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, officials said. But it took nine and a half minutes — almost twice the national goal of arriving within five minutes — for the fire engine, with a paramedic and more medical equipment, to get there. An ambulance came moments later and took Bentley to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Maybe that little boy would have died anyway. But wouldn’t you rather the question wasn’t out there? His family would, and they’re publicizing his story to draw attention to the problem.

State and municipal budget crises bring the overall economic crisis into sharp focus. If we can’t look at gravel roads and disappearing public transit and closed libraries and firehouses and see that something needs to be done, will Bentley Do’s story be enough? How much more of this will our government tune out before acting to end the crisis?

Tags: economy, state budgets