GILROY
– After spending eight and a half months working and living out
of a trailer, emergency workers have moved into a new fire station
on Sunrise Drive, the city’s third.
Gilroy Fire Department Capt. Moe McHenry and
firefighter/paramedic Heinz Maibaum happily settled into the new
digs Tuesday. Around them, a handful of construction workers buzzed
around, but it’s clear from looking around that there’s not much
left to do. The biggest job is to get the trailer hauled away and
pour concrete on the ground where it stood.
GILROY – After spending eight and a half months working and living out of a trailer, emergency workers have moved into a new fire station on Sunrise Drive, the city’s third.
Gilroy Fire Department Capt. Moe McHenry and firefighter/paramedic Heinz Maibaum happily settled into the new digs Tuesday. Around them, a handful of construction workers buzzed around, but it’s clear from looking around that there’s not much left to do. The biggest job is to get the trailer hauled away and pour concrete on the ground where it stood.
The new facility is finished enough for a two-person team of one captain and one firefighter/paramedic to work and live out of. The crew made the move last Thursday afternoon.
Now the GFD and the firefighters’ union are busy buying furniture, dishes, flatware and cleaning products.
“It’s kind of like moving into a house when all is said and done because you’ve got to be there for 24 hours at a time,” Gilroy Fire Department Division Chief Phil King said Tuesday.
McHenry and Maibaum echoed his comment. From 8 a.m. Tuesday until 8 a.m. today, the station was their home. After two days off, they’ll be back for another 24-hour shift.
The station is designed to house a four-person fire-engine crew, but it’s looking like that won’t happen in the upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1. King said a Sunrise fire crew is not currently included in the city budget for 2004-05, which City Council members are expected to finalize next month.
Unlike the common dorm rooms at the Las Animas and Chestnut stations, Sunrise has four separate dorm rooms with two beds in each. There also are four bathrooms.
“We get some privacy, which is nice,” McHenry said.
For the down time between emergency calls, there is a den with four lounge chairs and a widescreen television, courtesy of their union. There also is an exercise room, but it has no equipment at the moment.
The “pride and joy” of the station, as McHenry put it, is the industrial-sized kitchen. There are three refrigerators and three food lockers, one for each shift, and all the appliances are shiny and new.
“It’s really pretty snazzy,” McHenry said.
“I wish I had it in my home,” Maibaum added.
Near the station’s front entrance, there is a conference room that can be used by the greater Gilroy community.
On Aug. 1, three GFD captains and three paramedics began working two-person shifts at the Sunrise station. In doing so, they dropped the GFD’s response time by two minutes to most medical calls in northwest Gilroy.
Before that, in the second quarter of 2003 (April 1 to June 30), paramedics from the Las Animas station responded in 8 minutes, 27 seconds or less to 95 percent of medical calls in the northwest quadrant, according to GFD records.
With the Sunrise crew, this response time dropped to 6 minutes, 31 seconds in the third quarter (July 1 to Sept. 30).
The response-time improvement is only for calls the Sunrise team handles on its own. It doesn’t include fire calls or calls in the city’s three other fire districts – or calls that require more than two paramedics, as when someone is not breathing or is in cardiac arrest.
