Seattle Fire Dept. facing mass staff shortage after vaccine mandate: 'Gambling' with lives

A former Seattle firefighter issued a stark public safety warning over the department’s massive staffing shortage as it allegedly refuses to rehire those fired over the COVID vaccine mandate.

Andy Pittman worked for the city of Seattle for more than six years before he was fired for refusing to take the vaccine. He joined “Fox & Friends First” to discuss how the shortage is impacting public safety in the Emerald City. 

“The city administration and Chief Scoggins are definitely gambling with the city’s lives,” Pittman told Ashley Strohmier on Tuesday. “It’s been shown before that one to two units out of service can have a pretty significant impact in the growth of the fire.”

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“Fires are growing at a much more rapid rate, so we have an even smaller amount of time to make a rapid response and get the fire out and rescue victims,” he continued. “So it’s very imperative that they start to play by the rules and act with integrity, which they haven’t up to this point.”

The city reportedly refused to rehire individuals fired over the vaccine, but is willing to entertain employing those who “resigned, retired, or was separated for medical or disability reasons but not granted disability retirement may request return of their name to a supplemental register to be considered with the open graded eligible register for the classification or rank,” The Post Millennial reported.

The staffing crisis has been so severe that certain fire units have allegedly been “browned out,” a term Pittman described as an effort to redistribute firefighters to mitigate the significant staffing deficiencies across the city. 

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“Browning out units is a term used when there’s not enough units to cover the city, and so when there’s not enough units, they have to shut some units down and start shuffling people to other units in the city to make sure that other areas are covered,” he said. “So rather than dealing with the staffing shortages, Chief Scoggins is focused on terms like brownout.”

As of July 2022, there were more than 100 staff vacancies, which could take several months and even up to one year to fill, according to Seattle radio host Ari Hoffman. 

But Pittman argued he believes the department is even further behind from mitigating the crisis than that. 

“Right now, they’re bringing members into the department, and they’re not able to pass all of the training, so they’re having to let those members go because they can’t meet the minimum qualifications and standards,” Pittman said. “So they’re actually falling much behind their projected staffing.”

“They only have 39 members actively through recruit school. They started with 53 that a target of 80. Currently, there’s about 40 vacancies as of March into April, and that’s not looking any better,” he continued. 

But even despite the challenges surrounding his termination, Pittman, who owns a construction company, said he would “absolutely” return to work at the department, citing his willingness to serve his community. 

“I love that job,” Pittman said. “A lot of my family still works there. Most firefighters do it because their duty to serve… It’s not about the job. It’s about the love of the job.”

Europe's electric car mandate is getting torn up, and Ferrari is into it

It looks like Ferraris will be screaming through the Italian countryside for decades to come.

The European Commission has agreed to demands from Italy and Germany to allow combustion engines to continue to be made as long as they run on carbon-neutral e-fuel.

Europe was set to ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles in 2035, but will now rewrite the regulations to carve out an exemption.

E-fuels are made from carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and combined with water to create combustible fuels that work like gasoline or diesel and emit only as much carbon when burned as was used to make them.

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When produced using zero emissions power, like wind or solar, the fuels contribute no additional greenhouse gases.

Porsche is among the companies that have invested in the technology and has demonstrated one of its gasoline-powered 911 sports cars running on fuel produced at a wind-powered plant in Chile.

The current production cost at the pilot plant is $45 per gallon, but Porsche expects that to be down to $8 by 2026, which would put it close to par with gasoline in Europe.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna told a Reuters Newsmaker event on Monday that the company still plans to electrify 80% of its lineup by 2030, but that the rule change opens up new opportunities.

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“The good news for us as a company … is that on top of electric cars, we’ll also be able to go on with our internal combustion engines ones,” Vigna said. “We don’t want to tell clients which car to use. We want to make three kinds of propulsion available for them — hybrid, electric and ICE — and they will chose.”

Rival Italian exotic sports carmaker Lamborghini, which is a sister company to Porsche as part of the VW Group, is about to begin transitioning all of its models to hybrid powertrains, but has no current plans to offer an electric car.

CEO Stephan Winkelmann has said the brand’s customers enjoy the sound and performance of a combustion engine that synthetic fuels could be one way to keep them alive.

A hybrid replacement for the Aventador that uses a V12 engine is set to be revealed on March 29, and it’s already sold out.

“We already have 18-19 months waiting period for a new car,” Winkelmann told FOX Business.

“We are selling more cars than we are able to produce.”

Italy is also lobbying for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel to be exempted, but the commission has not yet indicated if they will be included in the updated regulations.