Sierra Conservation Center is not a camp, nor does it field fire crews. It’s the Inmate training facility.
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That is true, although it was my understanding, that in this consolidation effort, that Sierra would become a dual function facility. That may or may not be the case but that was what I had been told by someone working on the transition efforts earlier this year.
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That would be good!
My Dad opened STC in 1964.
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Having seen how the State operates for quite some time, it is highly likely that the thought process would have changed 15-20 times and will change again, 15-20 times before consolidations actually take place. Personally, it would make more sense to me to move the Baseline personnel to Vallecito from a purely cost perspective but we shall see.
The reality is that there will be more consolidations and trimming before this is all said and done.
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Vallecito makes more sense.
Edited. Info in previous post
Baseline Crews were actually out of Sierra Conservation Center before the separate stand alone camp was built
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One of the main reasons they built the “new” Baseline Camp at Peoria Flat was so that they didn’t have to get the fire crews released from inside the prison when they were dispatched to a fire after hours or on the weekends.
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There was a list of criteria used for making the decisions about which camps to close and where to move them. Based on (not in any order) population, location, activity, how many camps in each particular unit, ownership of the camps and a couple others. The closing of camps doesn’t have to do with COVID but the reduction of inmates. The COVID just sped it up the last few months. Also Malibu only has 8? inmates I think. CIW and LA County are still making the desicion about keeping that camp as well.
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They could move the Rainbow folks there and keep that camp open for LA County.
That was always an issue with institution based camps, Cuesta, Los Robles, DeWitt Nelson…come to mind
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I think that’s a separate contract between LA County and CIW. It has nothing to do with Cal Fire. I was just adding Malibu into the conversation because it is still a female inmate camp that has been affected by all of the same stuff. I’m not sure about the male inmates in LA County. I’m just glad I don’t have to make those decisions!
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Correct
COVID is the convenient political excuse for current times. Prop 47 and AB 109 gutted our inmate population and has been an issue for over 3 years . It has been a hush hush don’t talk about it topic until covid gave a great excuse.
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I’m only gonna critique this once. California needs to restore it hand crew numbers back to the 400+ they had 14 years ago. reducing them down to 296 hand crews is not serving the citizens of California well. I seeing 100ac - 500ac fires taking 3+ days to contain, and my jaw drops. At Full force we would contained 1000 ac fires in the first burn period. What the hell is going on? If we need to make at minimum 10 free hand crews per Unit, then lets do so this fire season. Last year was awful in the size the fires got. There, Rant over.
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Seen a tweet about the #HeritageFire in #SanBernardinoCounty that calfire wasn’t assisting because they didn’t have enough crews to spare. I lost the tweet and I’m bummed because I’m not sure who posted it and if they’re solid or not but it was interesting.
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How do you propose to solve the demographic problem?
For every 100 people leaving the work force(fire, LE, Construction, Plumbers, Teachers, etc) only 80 are entering the work force.
Solve that problem and you can have your hand crews.
Until then, “you go to war with the army you, not the army you want”.
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Amen to that. We need a stong cadre of Firefighters everywhere.
Be Safe All.
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14 years ago, Cal Fires hand crews were 100% inmate staffed, other than the crew captain obviously. Now with lighter sentencing and often no prison time, if crimes are even prosecuted when a person is caught, there aren’t near enough inmates coming into the prisons let alone qualifying for camp.
Trying to make up for it with CCC and FF1’s, sorry there’s just not enough people that want the job.
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Cal Fire did assist with 2 engines, 2 crews, and a dozer on the Heritage.
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