OAKLAND, Calif. (KRON) – Oakland firefighters are going on the offensive to prevent the city council from shuttering as many as six fire stations over the next several months. The cost-cutting move has been recommended as one of the ways to balance Oakland’s massive budget deficit.   Oakland firefighters are launching a public education campaign in hopes Oakland residents will help them stop the Oakland City Council from closing two fire stations on the first of next year, and possibly four more in the spring. Both were recommended to help close the city’s $129 million budget deficit. Oakland fire captain Seth Olyer is Vice President of the Oakland Firefighters Union Local 55. He says when you shutter fire stations, you increase response time because instead of coming from your neighborhood, fire crews may have to come from across town, and in the case of fires and medical emergencies, every second counts.  Bay Area hotels accused of ignoring sex trafficking on premises: lawsuit “House fires doubles in size every 30-45 seconds. And so we’re talking about a kitchen fire becoming a house fire, a house fire becoming several houses on fire as you wait for your first fire engine to show up, or medical emergencies become tragedies,” Olyer said.  Fire chief Damon Covington told the city council the same thing back in October, just days after the Keller Fire broke out in the Oakland Hills and was quickly extinguished. “So if you take five engines out of place, and those three engines that we don’t normally have, that’s eight engines that would have been first due to that fire and we came within 200 yards of Campus Drive. So you can see, very little math will tell you that we would have lost, probably lost those homes on Campus Drive at a minimum,” Covington said.  Oakland firefighters know the city must balance its budget but say before cutting public safety the city should first gather uncollected revenues and review management compensation. “It’s a lot of work that needs to be done, but we feel that there’s a number of ways to do this, instead of just slashing public safety.” The firefighters’ union is also reviewing whether these cuts violate the minimum service level requirement in their contract. The Oakland City Council is expected to start making these tough decisions at its meeting on Dec. 17.