Bonita-Sunnyside Fire Protection District in Bonita traces its origins to 1939 when the Upper Sweetwater Valley Volunteer Fire Company first responded to emergencies using 500-gallon fruit-sprayer trucks loaned by the Sweetwater Fruit Company. Formally reorganized as a fire protection district in September 1952, the single-station agency on Bonita Road now fields Engine 38 and Engine 238 with 12 career firefighters covering 7.0 square miles and a population exceeding 18,000 — a territory that includes the medical-transport corridor feeding into Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. The district's service area encompasses residential and commercial Bonita, County Regional parklands, and conservation zones managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within the Sweetwater Unit of the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge. BSFPD deploys personnel on statewide wildfire assignments through the San Diego County Central Zone in conjunction with CAL FIRE, with recent deployments to the Tenaja, Apple, LNU Complex, Valley, Creek, and Dixie fires — mutual-aid capacity that also supports residential fire-prevention inspections near assisted-living communities such as Bonita Villa Senior Living. The district averages 1,800 calls annually and operates under Heartland Communications Authority dispatch, with a Chula Vista Fire Department paramedic ambulance (Medic 38) co-housed at the Bonita Road station for advanced life-support response.