Like many other firefighters, I grew up watching the TV Show “Emergency” based on a LA County Fire Department Squad and Station being Squad 51 and Station 51.

In the 6 or so visits I have made to LA, I have never had the chance to visit the station where the series was filmed. I had been to the new Station 51 on Universal Studios back in ’96, have seen the original Squad at the Fire Museum in ’92 and one of the Engine 51’s in Yosemite in ’92. So today we had the transportation and were sort of heading in the right direction and made our way down to Carson City to Station 127.

Station 127 was where Universal spent 6 months filming in and around the station before heading back to the sound stage to do the majority of the filming. The Station has not changed all that much from the 70’s and in fact they have left most of it the same due to the large numbers of visitors they get from around the world.

The Station currently runs a Tiller Ladder and an Engine and in fact never ran a Squad (Station 36 down the road is the Squad Station).

The guys were happy to show us around and even went to a call with the Tiller to impress the kids. I gave them a couple of patches to throw on their board and bought a T-shirt and patch. One more thing ticked off.

I was surprised there was no geocache here so I made one. It is GA1525 – Squad 51 this Rampart Emergency …

I had another meeting with a Southern Californian Fire Department with regard to a proposed attachment program. I met with Battalion Chief Gary Sumich and Assistant Chief Windsor. They were interested but like most departments in California are under extreme budget pressure.

They are a small department with 7 stations but with plans to expand to 10 with future building delopments. The population is around 200 000 but this is fairly flexible and they doing around 15 000 calls of which about 75% are medical related.

We discussed how the program would work then Gary took me to their Number 1 Station and Number 7 Station.

Number 1 Station ran an Engine, Tiller Ladder and USAR Heavy Rescue. It was also a multicultural station with an Australian, German and South African firefighters.

Number 7 Station was a double station shared with the Ventura County Fire Department. It was 2 stations mirrored with a wall in the middle. Both departments get on well and mutual aise each other. Oxnard ran an Engine and Hazmat Vehicle and had a spare Tiller Ladder stored here.

Jenny and the kids ended up at the local library where the kids got their fix on Facebook and MSN.

Whilst Jenny and the kids slept in to recover from Disneyland, I headed over to the Orange County Fire Authority to meet with Battalion Chief Mike Ferdig. Mike was recently over at the Victorian Fires and had shown interest in an exchange program with an urban fire service in Australia.

Our Chief is keen to get a DO program up so I was asked to make initial contact with a couple of departments – OCFA being the first.

Mike shown me over the excellent facility they have which is around 10-12 years old. All services including Engineering, Communications, Training and Administration is at the one site.

I observed the Dispatch Centre in operation (hopefully SACAD brings in some of these features they had here) then watched a Truck Company undergoing some BA training with search and rescue.

Left here at 12:00 to find everyone still in bed back at the hotel.