The battle blazes, respond to car crashes, and rescue people stuck on the mudflats, but the Girdwood Fire Department has been facing a personnel shortage for quite some time. Now, more volunteers are stepping up to answer the call, and the fire chief says the response has been overwhelming. Since February, the department has had two successful academies of eight recruits each. "We do backcountry rescues, front-country rescues, as I said, medical calls, fire calls, vehicle accidents, pretty much anything that somebody needs help with, we're doing what we can to help them," said Capt. Chris Carson. Now, eight recruits are on board ready to take on the challenge. That's more people ready to respond to calls along the Turnagain Arm. "There's nowhere else you can drive a fire truck then jump on a snow machine to go rescue somebody out of a crevasse in a glacier," said Lt. Connor Gamache.  

First responders rush through the streets to save lives every day, but that comes with a risk and, sometimes, a cost. With more than 30 crashes involving Jacksonville police and fire vehicles last week, city leaders are once again concerned about safety. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office alone had 24 crashes last week, with the officers at fault in 17 of them. Jacksonville Fire-Rescue vehicles were involved in seven additional crashes, and five were found to be the firefighters' fault. Because of past incidents and maintenance, 54 JSO vehicles are out of service out of 1,700 vehicles in its fleet. An additional 22 JFRD and 79 other city vehicles are offline for maintenance. Earlier this year, the I-Team reported that crashes of city vehicles cost taxpayers an average of more than $1.5 million each year.  

Ever wonder how fire agencies decide who and when to evacuate? It's not a decision made on a hunch. It requires making sense of huge amounts of real-time data and intelligence, and getting it wrong or late can have tragic consequences. Not than long ago, fatalities in California's wildfires were very rare. But the rapidly accelerating pace and size of fires in the state has taken a heavy toll. Last year's Camp Fire left more than 80 people dead and all but wiped out the town of Paradise. The Tubbs Fire, which ravaged wine country in 2017, resulted in more than 20 deaths. And the Woolsey Fire destroyed more than 1,600 homes in Ventura County last fall, leaving three people dead in its wake. To help minimize this loss of life and property, the Los Angeles Fire Department and other agencies use cutting-edge technology to model and predict what a fire's going to do next and use that information to figure out who needs to evacuate.  

If you have a heart attack in Harlowe, according to resident and former firefighter Rufus Carter, you are in serious trouble: it's going to take the ambulance an average of 18 minutes and 22 seconds to get there. If you live in nearby Adams Creek, the response time is even longer. That's the longest average response time for EMS in the county by nine and a half minutes (in Fort Barnwell) and nearly 11 minutes longer than the county's quickest (Township 7). While the Harlowe and Adams Creek community has its own fire department, it must rely on Havelock EMS for ambulance calls. Many in the community think its time for that change. "EMS is needed here," Carter, one resident leading the push, said. He said the county commissioners have been reluctant to raise the community's taxes to cover a local EMS base – "It would raise the taxes up from 1 to 5 cents," he believes – but he feels that wouldn't matter. "What's more important? A life, or raising the tax?"  

Chicago has the largest number of women fighting fires and working on ambulances of any city in the country, the city's fire commissioner said Wednesday, but they make up less than 10% of the department's total personnel. In a department that has long dealt with diversity issues, aldermen also pressed Chicago Fire Department officials to better address the under-representation of black and Latino firefighters on the force, an annual complaint when officials come to City Hall for their budget hearing. Commissioner Richard Ford II called on aldermen to help get more minorities to take tests to get on the force. "When we do our outreach for recruitment, we really don't have control over who is coming in to take this test," Ford said. "What I would like to do is work with the aldermen, work with (Department of Human Resources) to increase that list, and thereby increase the diversity."  

The California wildfires and PG&E's incompetence are having a terrifying impact on the residents of California, who face not only immense risk to life and property, but a growing number of power and telecom-related outages that make a bad problem worse. There are more than a dozen wildfires currently raging across California, and heavy winds this week are only expected to exacerbate the problem. PG&E plans to cut power to more than half a million California residents this week as the ill-prepared company attempts to mitigate harm caused by its antiquated infrastructure. The fires and power outages are also having a profound impact on the state's telecom networks. According to data released by the FCC, 874 of the state's 26,000 cell sites were out on Monday, up from 630 on Sunday. Given the majority of these sites have no backup power, they're useless once fire or PG&E's rolling blackouts come knocking.