A Day in the Life: Fire Station 35

We all know that firefighters are the ones running into buildings while everyone else is running out. But as La Jolla Patch learned recently, there’s even more to the job than that.  

La Jolla Patch spent the day riding along with Fire Station 35, which is located at 4285 Eastgate Mall and serves La Jolla, UC San Diego, Golden Triangle, University City and UTC. Capt. Cory Beckwith, a 14-year veteran of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department answered some questions for us.

La Jolla Patch: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about firefighters and firefighting?

Capt. Cory Beckwith: One of the top misconceptions is that firefighters fight fire only, instead of realizing that the fire service has transitioned into an all-risk response agency. 

When people don’t see a lot of fires happening on the news, they wonder what are firefighters doing on a daily basis. They don’t understand the community service that we do, the fire prevention inspections that we do on businesses—not that they don’t understand—they aren’t knowledgeable. We train ... much like a professional sports team—a basketball team—they are practicing every day to get better for game time. Well, we have to do the same thing. We have so many technical pieces of equipment on that engine and on that fire truck that the last thing you want to be doing is trying to figure it out when you roll up on the scene of an emergency.

Another misconception is about the amount of risk that firefighters take, or are willing to take, on a daily basis.

We always think about firefighters going into a burning fire while everybody else is running out—which is true—but … we just recently had an EMT killed on the freeway. One of the most dangerous places that we hate being on is the freeway. We try to mitigate those situations as quickly as possible.

Not only that, cliff rescues—when you are dangling on a cliff on a rope with your hardware on going down to do a victim pick-off or package a patient to be lifted by the helicopter.

And in the EMS world, we are going on calls where people could have every disease known to mankind, from HIV, to MRSA to TB, meningitis, all of those types of things. And when you think about the fact that we go home every day to our families, and if we don’t know we’ve been exposed to something, all of a sudden we might be exposing our family or our friends to those diseases.

La Jolla Patch: What types of calls do you respond to most frequently in the 92037 zip code?

Beckwith: Most frequently in La Jolla are the medical aid responses. And really, citywide, about 80 percent of what we do is EMS. In La Jolla you have a large population of elderly, you have assisted living and high-rises, and there are areas off of Governor that have condo complexes that house a lot of elderly. And we spend a lot of time at the university with the kids over there that get sick or injured. But most of the time we are on one side of town or the other responding to the elderly.

If you'd like to learn more about the San Diego Fire Department, you can do so here.

And you can visit the department on Facebook.

Editor's note: The day La Jolla Patch spent at Station 35 the engine was browned-out, which meant that only one of the two crews that normally staff the station was present.