If you spend much time in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, you’ll notice, amid the clamor of buses, trucks, car horns, and vendors hawking their wares, an almost constant symphony of sirens.
They shout day and night in rapid response to a never-ending series of emergencies, many of which are in and around MacArthur Park. But it’s not usually a fire that LAFD Station 11 responds to. Through August of this year, there were 599 calls for drug overdoses, compared to 36 calls for structure fires.
“I had three in one day, the same person,” said firefighter and paramedic Madison Viray, who has worked at Station 11 for nine years.
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This is just one example of the severity of the epidemic in poor neighborhoods where homelessness is rampant, drugs are sold and consumed in the open, 83 people died of overdoses in 2023, and traders complain of gang threats and drug thefts.
In the middle of it all is Station 11, located on 7th Street, two blocks from the park, with its trucks traveling 24 hours a day in all directions. Hanging on a wall inside the station is a proclamation from Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez and her colleagues honoring the crew for being ranked by Firehouse Magazine as the busiest ladder company in the country in 2022.
This year, Station 11 ranks just behind Station 9 in Skid Row (site of the city’s other major drug zone) in total runs, but is on track to match the total of 15,262 calls for fires and medical incidents last year (the majority of which did not involve overdoses).
As I met with several team members at Station 11 Wednesday afternoon, Viray and engineer Cody Eitner left abruptly to respond to a call from an alley near 6th Street and Burlington Avenue. They returned shortly after to say it was too late to save the victim.
“Someone found him and called him, but they had been gone too long and there was nothing we could do,” Eitner said.
Word on the street is that drugs in the neighborhood are dirty. Cocaine may be spiked with fentanyl, and fentanyl may be spiked with the veterinary tranquilizer Xylazine, or “tranq,” which increases the risk of bad reactions.
It is not uncommon to see people in the park with multiple festering ulcers on their arms and legs – one of the side effects of the tranquilizer. It’s also not uncommon to see people doubled over, like twisted statues, due to muscular rigidity that firefighters call the “Fentanyl kink.”
“Most of the time, they’re grateful that their lives were saved,” Cody Eitner said of the people they revived after drug overdoses.
Battalion Chief Brian Franco, who first worked at Station 11 two decades ago as a firefighter, said, “We’ve seen a lot more deaths from overdoses than from heroin.” »
And yet, along with fentanyl, the drug naloxone, if administered quickly enough, can reverse the effects of opioids and save lives. Sometimes it is used by friends of the victim or by a MacArthur Park Overdose Response Team recently created by Councilman Hernandez and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Or by the Station 11 teams.
“The vast majority of our [overdose] the calls are now fentanyl,” said Capt. Adam VanGerpen, who is a public information officer but also races. “If we notice that there are very shallow breaths… then we will open their eyes and see if their pupils are precise. Now we know it’s probably not… cardiac arrest or… respiratory arrest. Now we think: OK, it’s an overdose.
It may be easier to treat a fentanyl case than a PCP or methamphetamine overdose, VanGerpen said, because the latter two drugs can make a person agitated and combative. If it’s a fentanyl overdose, responders will administer naloxone as a nasal spray (Narcan), inject it into a muscle, or pump it intravenously, depending on the situation.
“Every time we succeed, it’s satisfying,” captain Adam Brandos said. “At a station like this, where we make so many calls and it’s kind of a monotonous routine, these little victories are really good for morale. But it’s not so satisfying to see the repetition. And we’re not changing the cycle at all. …It just keeps repeating itself over and over again.
Sometimes, Brandos said, just one response can trigger a cascade: “We might make a call in the park where that call turns into four, because of … the other guy who’s by the tree and the another girl who is near the tree. lake, then the other person who is here. So it’s pretty normal.
What’s most striking about all of this, Brandos said, is that these scenes play out so frequently that they have become normalized.
When we first see the scale of social collapse and public distress, it is shocking. But everything is there the next day, the next day, and even if the shock continues, a little numbness sets in, accompanied by doubts about the capacity of the powers in place to restore a semblance of order.
Anthony Temple, an emergency response technician at Station 11, took me on a somber virtual tour of a typical day, starting at the Westlake/MacArthur Park subway station, which in recent years has become a underground of horrors:
Captain Adam VanGerpen watches a fire truck deploy from Station 11.
“People overdosed … on the subway platform while others were getting off the train,” Temple said. “There are people moving around this person, and we all come over there and do what we have to do and take them to the hospital and leave. And you go back to the station and you’re sent on another overdose where the person will be down on the sidewalk, kind of like hanging in the street. …
“It’s just day by day, morning, noon, night, sidewalk, platform, stairway, park,” Temple said. “You know, it’s like everywhere.”
Two team members, Viray and Brandos, said they brought their children to the neighborhood to show them where Dad works and show them a world they couldn’t have imagined.
And the reaction?
“Shocked,” Viray said of her 14-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.
Emergency medical technicians and paramedics at Los Angeles Fire Station 11 monitor a man they revived from an overdose.
“I wanted to show them what decision-making could look like,” said Brandos, whose daughters are 9 and 11. “They wanted to know why everyone was leaning on the sidewalk. … I explained to them exactly what was going on.”
The crew told me they share a camaraderie specific to the demands of Station 11. If you choose to work there, it’s because you enjoy staying busy, you take pride in the number of races, and you learn to accept that you didn’t work there. create the crisis and cannot resolve it. You can only answer one call at a time.
Just before 6:30 p.m., a call came in. A middle-aged man was at Alvarado Street and Wilshire Boulevard, across from the park, in possible cardiac arrest following an overdose. A truck and an ambulance rolled up, lights flashing and sirens blaring. They were there in less than three minutes.
The discussion took place in front of Yoshinoya Japanese Kitchen, lined with sellers of electronics, clothing and toiletries. Some of them closed their doors in the fading light of day, and people were still gathered behind the restaurant, in an alley that serves as a drug bazaar. It is a hellish landscape that has become part of the terrain, like the palm trees that rise on Alvarado Street and the extinguished street lights.
One salesman went about his business as if he had seen this scene play out so many times that he didn’t need to watch it again. Some passersby stopped to watch the commotion, perhaps waiting to see if the unconscious man would make it. A boy around 10 years old came close enough to observe three firefighters walking towards the man.
The air was saturated with the day’s wasted energy and lost opportunities, and where I stood behind the ambulance, trash sprawled six feet into the street from the sidewalk. A bag of chips. A Yoshinoya takeaway bag. Coke cans. Empty food containers.
All of this is the normalized reality of a neighborhood that was once a jewel of the city and is now waiting for someone, anyone, to stand up and say that this should not exist, cannot exist and must stop , for good. of civility and for the benefit of the workers who constitute the majority of the inhabitants here and who raise children who deserve better.
Emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics from Los Angeles Fire Station 11 prepare to take a man, who just woke up from a drug overdose, to the hospital on the corner of S . Alvarado and Wilshire Blvd.
Firefighter/EMT Luke Winfield donned a pair of white latex gloves and prepared an IV nalaxone, tied a blue tourniquet around the man’s arm and dipped the life-saving medication into the crook of his elbow.
After a few seconds, the man got up as if on springs, back from the brink of death. He asked what happened.
“You overdosed,” one of the firefighters said.
Still wobbly, he fell onto a sales cart and lay on his back, watching the reincarnated sky as it turned pink. He was going to get there. This time. They loaded him into the ambulance to take him to the hospital.
I asked Winfield how many times in his two years at Station 11 he had done what he had just done.
“Hundreds,” he said. “This hub is crazy.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
