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New Fire Chief Greg Lloyd briefs commission on calls, mutual aid and preparedness
Summary
Chief Greg Lloyd, newly sworn-in, presented August call volumes including 283 calls for service, discussed mutual-aid exchanges, staffing vacancies and recruitment, and outlined earthquake and CERT preparedness steps and communication channels.
Chief Greg Lloyd, newly sworn in as South Pasadena fire chief, told the Public Safety Commission he will provide monthly updates on department activity and planning as the city’s call volume and operational needs evolve.
Lloyd reported department activity for the most recent month included 54 emergency medical calls, 4 fires, 2 hazardous-condition calls, 9 service calls and 64 other calls (including false alarms and miscellaneous responses), a monthly total he gave as 283 calls for service. Lloyd said mutual-aid exchanges with neighboring agencies are roughly balanced: units from South Pasadena respond outside city limits about as often as outside agencies respond into South Pasadena.
“Once we get to 3,000, that’s where you start to look at…utilization,” Lloyd told commissioners, using the figure to explain when staffing and planning for inspections and training begin to be affected by emergency-response demands.
Staffing and recruitment: Lloyd said leadership ranks are filled but the department currently has three engineer vacancies and two firefighter–paramedic vacancies (one vacancy resulting from a pending retirement). He said a recruitment effort is underway and that interviews and hires could happen within roughly 90 days.
Mutual aid and response-time concerns: Lloyd said longer travel distances for mutual-aid units can affect response times on high-acuity incidents such as cardiac arrest and stroke; he said the department will continue to analyze response-time impacts and coordinate maps and routing with neighboring agencies.
Preparedness and community outreach: Lloyd described earthquake-response procedures (dispatch alerts, opening station apparatus doors, windshield surveys, and rapid damage reporting) and said the department will work closely with CERT volunteers during major incidents. He introduced Colin Corson as the new CERT coordinator and encouraged residents to use Ready.gov for emergency notifications. Lloyd also noted local city channels such as South Pasadena Connect and the police department’s Nixle account for geographically targeted alerts.
Other items: Lloyd relayed Southern California Edison’s warning of a regional “heat storm” that has strained the electrical grid and at one point caused outages affecting about 13,000 residents; he urged the community to use the city’s notification tools and participate in preparedness activities planned for September and the statewide Great ShakeOut in October.
