Column: At LAFD Station 11, one of the busiest in the nation, few fires, but no end to overdose emergencies

If you happen to spend a lot time within the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, you’ll discover, amid the clamor of buses and vehicles and automobile horns and distributors hawking their items, a virtually regular symphony of sirens.

They scream day and night time in fast response to an countless run of emergencies, a lot of them in and round MacArthur Park. Nevertheless it’s not often a fireplace that LAFD Station 11 is responding to. By way of August of this 12 months, there have been 599 drug overdose calls, in contrast with 36 runs for construction fires.

“I’ve had three in sooner or later, identical particular person,” stated firefighter/paramedic Madison Viray, who has labored at Station 11 for 9 years.

That’s only one measure of how unhealthy the epidemic is within the low-income neighborhood the place homelessness is rampant, medication are bought and consumed within the open, 83 folks died of overdoses in 2023, and retailers complain of gang threats and thefts by addicts.

In the midst of all of it is Station 11, positioned on seventh Road two blocks from the park, with its vehicles rolling out across the clock in each route. Hanging on a wall contained in the station is a proclamation from Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez and her colleagues honoring the crew for being ranked by Firehouse Journal because the busiest ladder firm within the nation in 2022.

This 12 months, Station 11 ranks simply behind Station 9 in Skid Row (web site of the town’s different main drug zone) for complete runs, however it’s heading in the right direction to match final 12 months’s complete of 15,262 requires fireplace and medical incidents (the vast majority of which don’t contain overdoses).

Pictures of the crew at Los Angeles Fireplace Station 11 are mounted within the recreation room of the firehouse.

Whereas I used to be assembly with a number of members of the crew in Station 11 Wednesday afternoon, Viray and engineer Cody Eitner left abruptly to reply a name from an alley close to sixth Road and Burlington Avenue. They returned a short while later to say they had been too late to avoid wasting the sufferer.

“Somebody discovered him and known as, however they’d been gone for too lengthy and there was nothing we might do,” Eitner stated.

The phrase on the road is that the medication within the neighborhood are soiled. Cocaine is likely to be spiked with fentanyl, and fentanyl is likely to be spiked with the veterinary tranquilizer Xylazine, or “tranq” —all of which elevates the opportunity of unhealthy reactions.

It’s not unusual to see folks within the park with a number of festering ulcers on their legs and arms — one of many side-effects of tranq. Neither is it unusual to see folks bent in half, like twisted statues, due to muscle rigidity the firefighters discuss with because the “Fentanyl fold.”

“More often than not they’re grateful for saving their lives,” Cody Eitner stated concerning the folks they’ve revived from drug overdoses.

Battalion Chief Brian Franco, who first labored at Station 11 twenty years in the past as a firefighter, stated, “we’ve seen much more fatalities from the overdoses than we did with heroin.”

And but with fentanyl, the drug naloxone, if administered shortly sufficient, can reverse the results of opiates and save lives. Generally it’s utilized by buddies of the sufferer, or by a MacArthur Park overdose response group just lately initiated by Councilmember Hernandez and the L.A. County Division of Public Well being. Or by crews from Station 11.

“The overwhelming majority of our [overdose] calls now are fentanyl,” stated Capt. Adam VanGerpen, who serves as a public info officer but additionally goes on runs. “If we see that there are very shallow respirations … then we’re gonna open up their eyes and see if their pupils are pinpoint. Now we all know it’s most likely not … cardiac arrest or … respiratory arrest. Now we’re pondering, OK, that is an overdose.”

It may be simpler to deal with a fentanyl case than a PCP or meth overdose, VanGerpen stated, as a result of the latter two medication could make an individual agitated and combative. If it’s a fentanyl overdose, responders will administer the naloxone as a nasal spray (Narcan), inject it right into a muscle, or pump it by an IV, relying on the state of affairs.

“Anytime we’re profitable, it’s satisfying,” stated Capt. Adam Brandos. “In a station like this, the place we run so many calls as we do, and it’s form of a monotonous routine, these little wins are actually good with the morale. Nevertheless it’s not so satisfying to see the repeat. And we’re not altering the cycle in any respect. … It retains repeating itself time and again.”

Two males stoop on a bench in MacArthur Park.

Generally, Brandos stated, a single response can set off a cascade: “We could go on one name within the park the place that decision turns into 4, as a result of … of the opposite man who’s over by the tree, and the opposite gal that’s over by the lake, after which the opposite person who’s over right here. In order that’s fairly regular.”

What’s most putting about all of it, Brandos stated, is that these scenes play out so steadily they’ve turn into normalized.

While you first set eyes on the depths of social collapse and public misery, it’s surprising. Nevertheless it’s all there once more the following day, and the following, and though the shock endures, a little bit of numbness takes maintain, together with doubts that anybody in energy is as much as the duty of restoring any semblance of order.

Anthony Temple, an emergency incident technician at Station 11, took me on a darkish digital tour of a typical day, starting on the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro Station, which has doubled lately as subterranean corridor of horrors:

Capt. Adam VanGerpen watches as a fireplace truck is deployed from Station 11.

“Folks have overdosed … on the subway platform whereas individuals are getting out of the prepare,” Temple stated. “You’ve received folks shifting round this particular person, and all of us come down there and do what we’ve received to do and take them to the hospital and go away. And also you return to the station and also you get dispatched on one other overdose the place the particular person shall be down, on the sidewalk, form of like hanging into the road. …

“It’s simply day in, time out, morning, midday, night time, sidewalk, platform, staircase, park,” Temple stated. “You recognize, it’s identical to in all places.”

Two members of the crew, Viray and Brandos, stated they’ve introduced their youngsters to the neighborhood to indicate them the place Dad works, and to indicate them a world they couldn’t have imagined.

And the response?

“Shocked,” Viray stated of his 14-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

Emergency medical technicians and paramedics with Los Angeles Fireplace Station 11 control a person they revived from an overdose.

“I wished to indicate them what some decision-making might seem like,” stated Brandos, whose ladies are 9 and 11. “They wished to know why everyone was leaning over on the sidewalk. … I instructed them precisely what was happening.”

The crew instructed me they share a camaraderie that’s particular to the calls for of Station 11. If you happen to select to work there, it’s since you like staying busy, you’re taking pleasure within the variety of runs, and also you study to just accept that you simply didn’t create the disaster and may’t repair it. You possibly can solely reply to it, one name at a time.

Simply earlier than 6:30 p.m., a name got here in. A middle-aged man was down at Alvarado Road and Wilshire Boulevard, throughout the road from the park, in attainable cardiac arrest from an overdose. A truck and an ambulance rolled, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They had been on the scene in lower than three minutes.

The topic was down in entrance of Yoshinoya Japanese Kitchen, which is bordered by distributors promoting electronics, clothes and toiletries. A few of them had been closing down within the fading mild of day, and folks had been nonetheless gathered behind the restaurant in an alley that serves as a drug bazaar. It’s a hellscape that has turn into a part of the terrain, just like the palm bushes that rise over Alvarado Road and the road lamps which have gone lifeless.

One vendor went about his enterprise as if he’d seen this scene play out so typically he didn’t must look once more. Some passersby paused to take a look at the commotion, maybe ready to see if the unconscious man would make it. A boy of 10 or so moved in shut sufficient to observe as three firefighters moved towards the person.

The air was rank with the day’s burned vitality and wasted probabilities, and within the spot the place I stood behind the ambulance, trash fanned out six toes into the road from the curb. A bag of chips. A Yoshinoya takeout bag. Coke cans. Empty meals containers.

All of that is the normalized actuality of a neighborhood that when stood as a gem of the town, and now suffers in wait for somebody, anybody, to face up and say this could not exist, can’t exist, and should finish, for the sake of civility and for the advantage of the working individuals who make up the vast majority of the residents right here, elevating youngsters who deserve higher.

Emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics with Los Angeles Fireplace Station 11 get able to take a person, they simply revived from a drug overdose, to the hospital on the nook of S. Alvarado and Wilshire Blvd.

Firefighter/paramedic Luke Winfield placed on a pair of white latex gloves and ready a nalaxone IV, tied a blue tourniquet across the man’s higher arm and plunged the life-saving drug into the crease of his elbow.

After a number of seconds, the person jerked up as if on springs, again from the sting of demise. He requested what had occurred.

“You overdosed,” one of many firefighters stated.

Nonetheless wobbly, he fell onto a merchandising cart and lay on his again, wanting up on the reincarnated sky because it pale to pink. He was going to make it. This time. They loaded him into the ambulance for a journey to the hospital.

I requested Winfield what number of occasions, in his two years at Station 11, he had performed what he simply did.

“Lots of,” he stated. “This hub is insane.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com