After a 7-year delay, San Diego has a roving fire truck for a hard-to-reach area — and more could be on the way soon.

San Diego is taking a long-awaited step toward reducing emergency response times in hard-to-reach areas of the city and neighborhoods with high call volumes.

The city launched its first rush-hour roving fire truck five months ago in downtown's East Village neighborhood — one of dozens of missing coverage areas where much-needed new fire stations won't be built before years.

The East Village rush-hour engine could be the first of many, with City Heights, Barrio Logan, Liberty Station and southeast San Diego near Ocean View Boulevard among the hottest candidates. probable.

The peak-hour engines are seen as a cheaper and faster way to expand the city's emergency response coverage without building new fire stations, which requires finding land and obtaining money for construction.

Although the East Village rush hour engine is assigned to a particular geographic area, these engines could also be disconnected from one station and simply deployed throughout the city each day during rush hours in busy areas.

City officials have favored the idea of ​​roving engines as a solution to coverage gaps since a consultant recommended them in 2017. But deployment has been delayed by staffing shortages.

“We've been dealing with this for some time, but lack of personnel has prevented us from pulling the trigger,” Fire Chief Colin Stowell said last week. “It made no sense to compound our staffing problems by adding an engine during peak hours when we were struggling to fill fire stations each day. »

Larger fire academies and more effective recruiting strategies in recent years have helped address the staffing shortage. So the city decided to spend $1.1 million to try a roving engine in the East Village for a year as a pilot program.

The engine, known as Engine 80, operates from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. from the same station as Engine 4, on the border of the East Village and Gaslamp Quarter, on Eighth Avenue near J Street.

Stowell said it has been a remarkable success so far, reducing the unusually high volume of calls handled by Engine 4 and reducing response times in the region.

Population growth in the East Village, particularly due to many new high-rise buildings, has increased call volume for Engine 4 to an average of 22 calls per day, with 26 to 28 on multiple days.

“It just wasn’t sustainable,” Stowell said, noting that some firefighters working on Engine 4 had physical or mental health issues.

Now, both engine makers receive about eight calls each between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and Engine 4 receives an average of eight more calls between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.

“It definitely made their day better and got them ready for the night,” he said of Engine 4.

The average response time in the area decreased by almost half a minute, with Engine 80 having an average response of 3 minutes and 39 seconds, the fastest response time in the city.

Stowell said that's partly because the East Village is so compact, making many of Engine 80's trips short but complicated.

Neighborhood community leaders praise the new engine, which Stowell said could increase from 12 hours to 24 hours as construction continues.

“We are very supportive of this new coverage,” said Dominic Li Mandri, district director of the East Village Association, noting that the neighborhood now has about 20,000 residents.

A dedicated fire station was envisioned for Broadway and 13th Street, near the city's police department headquarters. But as with most new fire stations in the city, that will take years to happen.

The union representing the city's firefighters said it was optimistic about the engine during peak hours, particularly in the East Village.

“This idea has been floating around for several years,” said George Duardo, president of the union. “The pressures in these dense areas are difficult. »

Duardo said the union is also interested in the possibility of having peak hour engines that are not directly tied to a single station, which would allow them to be deployed as replacements for engine companies that are not on duty for training.

Roaming Engines could also be strategically deployed in areas with high call volumes during late afternoon and evening commute hours. And they could help serve South Bay neighborhoods separated from the rest of the city by Chula Vista and National City.

City officials said several years ago that they planned to add six engines during peak hours — three in July 2019 and three more in July 2020 — to help make up for the city's missing fire stations.

Stowell finally said, adding that multiple was a realistic possibility, but that the plan was much smaller to begin with.

He said the next likely location would be City Heights, where a long-awaited new fire station on Fairmount Avenue has been bogged down by a complex environmental approval.

Even after that approval was obtained, Stowell stressed that no money was set aside for construction.

A new fire station was recently built in University City, and two more are planned in Black Mountain Ranch and Otay Mesa. But these were funded by developer fees.

“We're seeing new stations come online, but they're in suburban areas where there's still development,” Stowell said, expressing frustration that more urban areas may not have new stations as quickly as they are needed.

Peak-hour engines could help mitigate the impact of missing stations.

Costs are relatively low because the engines can come from the city's reserve fleet.

The city also recently freed up some of the funds that had been used for rapid response teams — two-person teams using van-style vehicles to assist firefighters.

The city had three rapid response squads – one each in Encanto, University City and the San Pasqual Valley. But new stations at Skyline and University City rendered two of the teams useless.

In San Pasqual, municipal authorities are proposing to increase from one to two rapid intervention squads.

“This is warranted because of the types of calls, not the volume of calls,” Stowell said, referring to wildfires and accidents on poorly lit State Highway 78 outside Escondido.

“These are horrible accidents,” Stowell said.

Peak hour engines and rapid response teams were both recommended by consultant Citygate as part of comprehensive analyzes of the city's fire coverage gaps conducted in 2010 and 2017.

Stowell, who is retiring this year, said it's probably time for another analysis.

“A lot has happened in seven years,” he said. “Our service gaps have changed. Modes of travel have changed.