Emergency Medical Services | Fire Suppression | Emergency Command Center
Urban Search and Rescue Team | Water Rescue Team | Fire Prevention
Vegetation Management Program | Training | Repair Shop | PreFire Management

Emergency Medical Services

The Marin County Fire Department has provided Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to the citizens of Marin since 1965 when a Cadillac ambulance was placed in service at the Point Reyes Station. The community of Point Reyes, led by Waldo Giacomini, provided funding for the first ambulance and its equipment. The American Red Cross trained personnel assigned to the ambulance at that time in advanced first aid. In 1977, nine firefighters from the department were sent to Stanford University for paramedic training. In April of 1978, Rescue 90 was placed in service in Point Reyes, becoming the first paramedic rescue ambulance in the county. This "emergency room on wheels" brought advanced life support services to West Marin. Paramedics received over 1200 hours of training including: anatomy, physiology, cardiac emergencies, advanced airway procedures and over fifty medications that they could administer. To support the Paramedic Program, in 1982 all Marin County Fire Department firefighters became Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs).

In 1985, in response to a request by the Ross Valley Paramedic Authority, the Marin County Fire Department assumed administration and staffing of Rescue 40 located at the Ross Fire Station. This Joint Powers Authority provides paramedic services to residents and visitors of the communities of Corte Madera, Larkspur, Kentfield, Ross, San Anselmo, Sleepy Hollow, Fairfax, and County Service Area 27. Rescue 40 responds to approximately 1500 calls per year. The addition of Rescue 40 benefits the department by providing a rescue unit with a higher call volume, allowing paramedics an opportunity to maintain their vital skills.

Constantly looking to provide cutting edge EMS, in 1995 the Marin County Fire Department trained all firefighters to use automatic defibrillation. Each fire engine was equipped with this life saving cardiac tool which allows first responders to convert patients in full cardiac arrest into a life saving cardiac rhythm.

The Marin County Fire Department EMS Division administers an EMT education program. This program allows firefighters to maintain their certification in-house, at a lower cost than sending personnel to outside training. The department offers EMT training to the Stinson Beach, Bolinas, Inverness, and Tomales Volunteer Fire Departments. Personnel from the Marin Municipal Water District, Pt. Reyes National Seashore, National Park Service, Skywalker Ranch, and Muir Woods National Monument, also attend this monthly training.

To increase the EMS level of service in the Tomales area, the Marin County Fire Department implemented an Advanced Life Support (ALS) paramedic engine in the fall of 1997. This brings a firefighter-paramedic and lifesaving equipment to visitors and citizens of Tomales within minutes. ALS transport ambulances provided under contract from Bodega Bay and Petaluma Fire Departments support the system.

The Marin County Fire Department has implemented a Continuous Quality Improvement Program, which provides peer review of the ALS system. New protocols allow the paramedics to provide care for patients without base hospital direction. This program allows the department to have continuous monitoring, improvement, and systems analysis of the paramedic service.

In the year 2000, the department staffed a rescue unit at Stinson Beach. This unit is staffed during the peak tourist season-Memorial Day through Labor Day. The Marin County Fire Department operates four Paramedic Rescue Ambulances, with a reserve rescue unit stationed in Woodacre (that can be staffed when needed), and two ALS engines. The twenty-two paramedics have an average of ten years of experience, many coming from high-call- volume urban areas. The paramedics and EMTs receive extensive training in hazardous materials, rope rescue, swift water rescue, confined space rescue, auto extrication and multi-casualty incidents.

Fire Suppression

From the waterfront at Marin City to the ranches of Hicks Valley, MCFD provides the highest level of structural fire protection. With the 1250 gpm pumpers, enhanced water supply systems, and the ongoing training, damage from structure fires are minimized. If an area is known to have a deficient water supply, water tenders are dispatched to the emergency scene. Mutual aid is received and provided by the closest resource with no regard to agency. Petaluma, Sausalito, Ross Valley and Novato are some of the agencies with mutual aid agreements.

Wildland Fires

As history has taught us, Marin County has the potential for a major wildland fire. In 1929, Mill Valley suffered a devastating fire that destroyed 119 homes. Today, that figure would be approximately 800-1000 homes within the footprint of the 1929 fire. The factors that add up to disaster for an urban-interface fire are all present within Marin. Steep slopes, heavy vegetation, narrow roads only lack hot-dry weather and an ignition source for another Oakland Hills Fire.

So what has the county done? It staffs a fleet of four wheel drive wildland fire engines during the summer months. Seasonal fire fighters augment the permanent staff to carry out functions such as hoselays, handline construction, and backfires.

The county's reputation as an excellent wildland fire resource has spread beyond the confines of the county. The department regularly dispatches five engines with a leader, called a strike team, to several fires throughout the state. The department also employs experts in specific command functions that respond to fires as part of the California Interagency Incident Management Teams. These teams are dispatched when fires overwhelm the local jurisdiction. With experts in operations, finance, logistics, and planning, the team plans, organizes, leads and directs thousands of firefighters in order to suppress a fire.

Emergency Command Center

Marin County operates their own dispatching from the Woodacre Headquarters Emergency Command Center (ECC). Not only does the department dispatch all 6 stations but also provides the dispatching for the areas of Stinson Beach, Bolinas, Inverness, and Skywalker Ranch. The ECC is responsible for coordinating the daily staffing, maintaining the fire weather system, and projecting the fire danger index during the summer months. Dispatcher answer a majority of the phone calls providing the publics first point of contact with the department.

The ECC also coordinates emergency response with neighboring agencies such as the California State Parks and the United States Park Service. The Marin County Fire Chief is the California Office of Emergency Services (OES) Area Coordinator. Dispatch coordinates all OES mutual aid request for both in-state and out-of-state request for assistance. All of the ECC officers are trained to the state and national level for resource management and deployment.

Urban Search and Rescue Team (USAR)

USAR’s Five Major Functional Elements:

The Marin County USAR team is designed to be totally self-sufficient for the first 48 hours of operation. Specialized equipment includes concrete and steel cutting tools, breaking devices, portable generators, power saws, drills, air bags, lighting, ropes and other technical rescue items. Other equipment carried by the three designated rescue units includes medical supplies, hazardous materials and radiation monitors, protective clothing, victim locating devices, search cameras, water rescue boats, communication equipment, and a laptop computer.

USAR’s Mission Statement:
To assist and provide the safe rescue of survivors of significant disasters and to reduce the loss of life.

Water Rescue Team

With the lessons learned from previous floods in the County of Marin, and what had happened in other counties with levee systems, it was decided to add a water rescue element to the Marin County Urban Search and Rescue Team.

All of the members from the water rescue team went to a week long class called Swiftwater Rescue Technician 1 and 2. Further training included inflatable rescue boat operations, personal watercraft operations, technical animal rescue, night river rescue training, and aquatic helicopter rescue training.

Equipment for the team includes: one rigid-hull inflatable rescue boat, two personal watercraft, personal protective equipment for each member, and technical rescue equipment.

On February 5, 1998, the Water Rescue Team went to work for the first time during the "Power Incident" at the PG&E sub-station in Novato. A levee failure near Highway 37 created a ten acre lake that was endangering the PG&E substation that supplies power to ninety percent of Marin County. The depth of the lake varied between four and ten feet and there were two foot high waves on what is normally a cow pasture. The team’s primary role was to provide water safety for the crews working on or near the water’s edge.

During the second day of the incident, the team’s responsibilities were expanded. With the reports of an eight foot tide at the Golden Gate Bridge, the team was requested to inspect the surrounding levees for potential dangers. During that inspection, 3 areas where the levee was being breached were found, and several areas where the water would soon be going over the levees were discovered. With the potential of the water raising up to three feet, this created a significant problem.

Both of the Water Rescue Team boats were used to ferry hand crews and sandbags to the levees. An additional boat and operator were provided by the Marin Municipal Water District. Before the day was over, 32 hand crew members and approximately 1,000 sandbags where shuttled to the trouble spots in the levees. The Water Rescue Team remained committed to the incident for four days working day and night shifts. The feedback from the hand crews and management team was all positive. They expressed an increased level of comfort while working near the water. Never before have they had a Water Rescue Team in the water while they were working on the water’s edge. After the Power Incident, it will be a standard throughout the state to have a Water Rescue Team on site when crews are working in a water environment. It was an excellent opportunity for the team to apply what it had learned and find areas that needed improvement.

Fire Prevention

The Marin County Fire Department Bureau of Prevention and Investigation supervised by the Fire Marshal is charged with two primary functions aimed at minimizing or preventing damage to life and assets as a result of fire. These functions are:

• Implementation of required fire safe and law enforcement sections of the Public Resources Code (PRC) in the State Responsibility Lands (SRA) within the County. These activities include managing the residential wildfire hazard reduction programs, new land development fire safe standards, monitoring high voltage power line compliance, and investigate the cause, origin and responsible act of all SRA vegetation fires.
• The Bureau is responsible for fire investigation and fire and life safety programs in the MCFD direct protection areas. These include commercial occupancy permitting and annual inspection, public education, and individual hazard abatements. The Bureau also responsible for issuing open burning permits in compliance with Bay Area Air Quality Management District, California Fire Code, and PRC regulations.

Additional responsibilities include: Department Information Officer, fire investigations for the Point Reyes National Seashore Lands, Bolinas Fire District, Inverness Public Utilities District and the Stinson Beach Volunteer Fire Department.

Vegetation Management Program

The Marin County Fire Department has treated thousands of acres of hazardous vegetation in the past. With the implementation of the California Fire Plan, a forester was hired to implement a Vegetation Management Program. The program is for communities, ranchers, and natural resource managers who wish to strengthen their protection against wildfire.

Benefits of the Vegetation Management Program include:

• The State of California indemnifies participants against damage liability claims.
• Up to 90% of project costs are covered.
• Resource specialists are provided to plan and implement projects.

The forester writes Vegetation Management Plans, which include: public notification plans, smoke management plans, environmental impact reviews, and more. Plans are designed to implement the best management practice to reduce hazardous fuels by three fuel management approaches.

The three fuel management approaches:

1. Residential fuel treatments that are used to create defensible space around structures and neighborhoods.
2. Fuelbreaks are corridors along roads or ridges where vegetation is controlled. Fuelbreaks reduce fire intensity and rate of spread allowing fires to be controlled.
3. Fuel reduction zones are broad, non-linear areas where natural fuels are reduced.

Excellent examples of the Vegetation Management Program are the Kent Woodlands I-Zone Project and the Marinview Project.

Training

The fire service today is markedly different from the service that existed 100, 50, or even 10 years ago. Not only have the apparatus and techniques changed, but also the personnel and role of the fire service. With the advent of formalized education programs, a firefighter has been elevated from that of a mere doer to that of a technician. Increased demands for service have expanded the role of the fire service into areas beyond fire protection. New responsibilities include: hazardous materials, urban search and rescue, and advanced life support.

It is the responsibility of the Marin County Fire Department’s Training Division to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s fire service. Fifty years ago, department training was limited to the equipment and techniques utilized to combat wildland fires. Today, in addition to instructing numerous firefighting skills, the training program includes lessons on hazardous materials, urban, water and confined space rescue, rope rescue, advanced and basic life support, automatic defibrillation, and cardio pulmonary resuscitation.

As the professionalism of firefighters continues to evolve, career ladders that identify required skills must also evolve. Through the leadership and recommendations of the Marin County Training and Education Committee, the Training Division maintains career ladders for all positions. These career ladders identify training standards for all personnel and guarantee minimum levels of proficiency. Additionally, these career ladders have led to the development of many in-house training courses that include: a basic fire academy for new employees, a wildland fire academy for seasonal firefighters and other agencies, a water tender operations course, and an off-road driving course.

Repair Shop

The Woodacre Repair Shop is responsible for the preventative maintenance and ongoing repairs for the entire fire department fleet. There are over 45 pieces of apparatus that must be maintained at the highest level of service in order to response at a moments notice. The department's mechanic is capable of performing everything from routine maintenance to complete overhauls. He attends the Fire Apparatus Mechanic Academy annually and is responsible for the very low amount of vehicle downtime.

PreFire Management

PreFire Management is a new program being implemented by the Marin County Fire Department. The program was born from the State Board of Forestry's 1996 California Fire Plan.

Dramatic and damaging fires like the Mount Vision and the Oakland Hills have become almost yearly events. Within the state, from 1984 to 1993, over 7000 homes were destroyed by wildland fire, 75 lives lost, and over 3-billion dollars expended in structure loss and suppression cost. The goal of the Fire Plan is to reduce citizen loss and government cost from wildland fires.

To accomplish this goal, the Marin County Fire Department hired a fire captain specialist to assess wildland fire hazards in the county. The four factors that make up the assessment are: hazardous fuel loading, severe fire weather, assets at risk, and past levels of service. Using new computer technology, each of these factors will be mapped to indicate areas of high risk and high hazard.

Hazardous fuels are the vegetation that feeds a wildfire. Due to the aggressive fire suppression policies during the last fifty years in America, fuels have been allowed to accumulate to dangerous proportions. When fires ignite in these tinderboxes, they burn more rapidly and with greater intensity. Through the assessment process, the location and density of these fuels will be evaluated.

Weather is the biggest factor of the fire equation. Since weather is a dynamic process, little can be done to alter its effects. This assessment is aimed at a better understanding of effects weather has on fuel and direction of fire spread as it relates to asset damage. The department intends to determine which locations suffer extreme fire weather with the most frequency based on aspect, historical weather from five fire weather stations, canopy sheltering, and marine inversion layers.

The primary goal of fire protection in Marin is to safeguard the wide range of assets found across wildland areas. There are several categories of assets listed in the state’s Fire Plan, such as: structures, air quality, water quality, infrastructure, etc. Some of these categories are tangible such as "structures" while others are harder to evaluate such as "air quality." Each category was compared to fuel loading to indicate overall risk.

The Level of Service (LOS) is an assessment that focuses on identifying areas with the potential of unacceptable loss and high-cost fires. For this assessment, the department created a new model. There are several components that define an unacceptable loss and high suppression cost fire. The department narrowed down four components that are common factors with damaging-costly fires. They are potential structure loss, travel times to the fire, historical fire occurrence, and resistance to control.

The assessment was performed using advanced mapping analysis using Geographic Information Systems or GIS. GIS is a method of analysis that allows the end user to overlay maps. To verify that projects are valuable, models of fire spread are created.

Three dimensional terrain model with the FARSITE fire spread simulator model for Cascade Canyon...roll cursor over the image to see flames.

With the completion of the assessment that identifies high-hazard areas in Marin County, vegetation management projects will be designed to reduce the hazard. Prescribed burning, chipping, and focused public education are a few examples of projects aimed at protecting assets at risk. The assessment identifies Marin County stakeholders, defined as any person, agency or organization with a particular interest (a stake) in fire safety and protection of assets from wildland fires. Stakeholders will play a vital role in designing and implementing fire hazard reduction projects.