If you spend much time in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, you will notice, amid the clamor of buses and trucks and car horns and vendors hawking their goods, a nearly steady symphony of sirens.
They scream day and night in rapid response to an endless run of emergencies, many of them in and around MacArthur Park. But it’s not usually a fire that LAFD Station 11 is responding to. Through August of this year, there have been 599 drug overdose calls, compared with 36 runs for structure fires.
“I’ve had three in one day, same person,” said firefighter/paramedic Madison Viray, who has worked at Station 11 for nine years.
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That’s just one measure of how bad the epidemic is in the low-income neighborhood where homelessness is rampant, drugs are sold and consumed in the open, 83 people died of overdoses in 2023, and merchants complain of gang threats and thefts by addicts.
In the middle of it all is Station 11, located on 7th Street two blocks from the park, with its trucks rolling out around the clock in every direction. 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 nation in 2022.
This year, Station 11 ranks just behind Station 9 in Skid Row (site of the city’s other major drug zone) for total runs, but it is on course to match last year’s total of 15,262 calls for fire and medical incidents (the majority of which do not involve overdoses).
While I was meeting with several members of the crew in Station 11 Wednesday afternoon, Viray and engineer Cody Eitner left abruptly to answer a call from an alley near 6th Street and Burlington Avenue. They returned a short time later to say they were too late to save the victim.
“Someone found him and called, but they’d been gone for too long and there was nothing we could do,” Eitner said.
The word on the street is that the drugs in the neighborhood are dirty. Cocaine might be spiked with fentanyl, and fentanyl might be spiked with the veterinary tranquilizer Xylazine, or “tranq” —all of which elevates the possibility of bad reactions.
It’s not uncommon to see people in the park with multiple festering ulcers on their arms and legs — one of the side-effects of tranq. Nor is it uncommon to see people bent in half, like twisted statues, because of muscle rigidity the firefighters refer to as the “Fentanyl fold.”
Battalion Chief Brian Franco, who first worked at Station 11 two decades ago as a firefighter, said, “we’ve seen a lot more fatalities from the overdoses than we did with heroin.”
And yet with fentanyl, the drug naloxone, if administered quickly enough, can reverse the effects of opiates and save lives. Sometimes it’s used by friends of the victim, or by a MacArthur Park overdose response team recently initiated by Councilmember Hernandez and the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Or by crews from Station 11.
“The vast majority of our [overdose] calls now are fentanyl,” said Capt. Adam VanGerpen, who serves as a public information officer but also goes on runs. “If we see that there are very shallow respirations … then we’re gonna open up their eyes and see if their pupils are pinpoint. Now we know it’s probably not … cardiac arrest or … respiratory arrest. Now we’re thinking, OK, this is an overdose.”
It can be easier to treat a fentanyl case than a PCP or meth overdose, VanGerpen said, because the latter two drugs can make a person agitated and combative. If it’s a fentanyl overdose, responders will administer the naloxone as a nasal spray (Narcan), inject it into a muscle, or pump it through an IV, depending on the situation.
“Anytime we’re successful, it’s satisfying,” said Capt. Adam Brandos. “In a station like this, where we run so many calls as we do, and it’s kind of a monotonous routine, those little wins are really good with the morale. But it’s not so satisfying to see the repeat. And we’re not changing the cycle at all. … It keeps repeating itself over and over again.”
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