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The East Bay has gotten a little more dangerous in the past few months. Without fanfare, the city of Oakland closed the fireboat. Not for a day, not for a week, but indefinitely. Shutters down, tanks empty, the Seawolf is destined for drydock.  

Simultaneously the city also closed Fire Station 2, which provides fire and medical protection for Jack London Square, one of Oakland’s prime tourist destinations. 

But the drop in fire protection for Oakland’s citizens is old news. Earlier this year the city closed two engines and one truck on a rotating basis—a rolling blackout on safety. Some days your neighborhood firehouse might be open and ready, some days not. Please try to make sure that nothing bad happens to you on a blackout day. 

The loss of the fireboat is a singular tragedy. 

Oakland has the fourth largest port in the country. We will now be the only one without a fireboat. The fireboat protects not only vessels off the coast, but also structures along the waterfront including restaurants, warehouses and private homes. In the event of an earthquake or large scale disaster, the fireboat can pump water from the bay in case EBMUD’s system is overloaded, as it was during the 1991 firestorm. 

Without a fireboat, responsibility for protecting the waterfront falls to the Coast Guard, an agency already dangerously overloaded by homeland defense. 

The loss of a fire station does not mean that residents of that district will be completely unprotected. Instead, the response will be slower, as it comes from farther away. Imagine that you live next door to a firehouse. If you dial 911 for a heart attack, you would expect an immediate response. But if your neighbors are off covering Jack London Square, you’ll have to wait for help from the next firehouse down the line. 

As more firehouses close, more dominoes fall as engines race around town covering unprotected districts. Having a heart attack is like drowning: without the heart, no oxygen reaches the brain. Try holding your breath for as long as you can. Now try holding it for another three minutes longer. That’s what happens when your firehouse is closed. Similarly, fires grow exponentially with time. What might have been a simple kitchen fire can turn into a full scale conflagration in just a few minutes extra. 

These closures aren’t just a problem for Oakland, they are a problem for everyone. 

In comparison to New York, San Francisco, or even San Jose, we’re all small departments over here, and we help each other out. If there is a fire in Alameda, Piedmont, Berkeley or Emeryville, you can bet that the OFD will be called for help. But if we’re already running short, we might not have any help to give. The dominoes fall outward in all directions from Jack London Square. 

I wish I could say that I have a perfect solution; I wish I could lay all the blame on the fire chief or the City Council. But the harsh reality is that the entire country is in fiscal crisis. There is simply not enough money to do all of the things that need to be done. 

As a firefighter I am admittedly biased: I think that our budgets should be inviolable. But my mother is a teacher, my father is a physician, and my wife works for the courts; we all have different ideas about which social services are sacrosanct. The fire department is a particularly ripe target for cuts, because we bring in essentially no revenue and we’re always breaking expensive things like ladders, fire trucks, and our bodies. 

There are no winners in a budget crisis. As we hold our breath through the dangerous month of October, marking the anniversaries the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Oakland Firestorm, the best that local citizens can do is roll the dice and hope that when the time comes, the fire station they need will have the lights on and the engine running. 

Zac Unger is an Oakland firefighter and frequent Daily Planet contributer.