For the first time in decades, the Anchorage Fire Department closed one fire station and parked two fire trucks at other stations Friday in an effort to save money in the face of ongoing budget woes.

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Matt Claman

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Station 15 in Bayshore was closed all day, while a truck at the downtown Station 1 and another at the Dimond Boulevard station, No. 12, were unstaffed until 9 p.m., said Anchorage Fire Chief Craig Goodrich.

Ambulance services were not affected, he said.

The temporary closures were part of an effort to save money after a directive from Acting Mayor Matt Claman to shave $1.7 million from the fire department's $70 million annual budget.

It was the first time any city fire services have been suspended since the mid-1970s, Goodrich said.

The chief said an unexpected number of firefighters and medics -- a total of 14 out of a 110-person daily operations shift -- were absent from work on Friday for various reasons including annual leave, a deployment to Iraq and several who called in sick. To fill their posts would have cost overtime, which he didn't want to allocate.

Goodrich estimated the department spends just under $1.7 million a year on overtime, and he's hoping by eliminating it he can avoid other painful cuts.

"It beats closing any station permanently," said division chief Bridget Bushue. "Hopefully this is a temporary fix."

Tom Wescott, president of the Anchorage firefighters union, disagreed with the decision, though. "It's a gamble," he said. "When you close down Station 15 ... you are keeping your fingers crossed that nothing happens there that requires a timely response."

By closing down three fire rigs, he said, the city lost 15 percent of its 20 fire apparatuses for a day. That, he says, is too much.

While the closures might not have shut down any ambulances per se, he said, it did affect medical response times because when the city's seven or eight ambulances can't get to a person, which they sometimes cannot, it's the paramedics and EMT's on the fire trucks who respond instead. "They get everything started and going, they just can't transport," Wescott said.

Claman says he needs to close a $17 million deficit in this year's city budget. Stock market plunges eroded what the city thought it had to spend this year.

Goodrich said after he was told to trim his budget, he expected there would be occasional closures and shut-downs. He just didn't expect them this soon. "We thought it would happen a couple of times a month," he said. "And right off the bat, Murphy's Law kicked in and it's kicked us."

Goodrich said he plans to temporarily cut back services from the areas where unexpected absences occur. That way, he said, the shutdowns hopefully won't affect one firehouse more than another.

Nearby stations will respond to the calls that a shut-down station would normally respond to, he said. This scaling back of services might cause firefighters to arrive at a burning home in the affected areas a minute or two later than before, Goodrich said. Firefighters normally are able to respond in less than four minutes.

Goodrich said he wasn't sure exactly how much Friday's actions actually saved.

The Anchorage Assembly approved a 3 percent wage increase for firefighters before members found out how much of a budget shortfall the city would be facing. The increase went into effect on Jan. 1 -- a total of $1.1 million. Wescott said the city has come back to him, asking for wage concessions, which the union is considering in light of the budget problems.

"We are really between a rock and a hard place here," said Assemblywoman Jennifer Johnston, who represents South Anchorage.

"There's no quick fix. We are in a better spot than a lot of other places. We're not in bankruptcy. But we can't kid ourselves that it's going to be easy."

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.

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