Thursday, March 28, 2024

Chelan Fire and Rescue Staff moves up

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CHELAN – Fire and Rescue 7 staff and commissioners initiated the regular commissioner’s meeting with an oath of office, and promotion and badge pinning ceremonies.
After being elected as commissioner number one to Chelan Fire and Rescue (CFR), Phil Moller swore his oath to office and sat amongst fellow commissioners, Russ Jones and Tom Peters, Wednesday, Jan. 10 at CFR Station 71. Following Moller’s oath to office, was a promotional and pinning ceremony for Assistant Chief Mark Donnell, who will now be serving as Deputy Chief of Operations. Brandon Asher was then announced as the new assistant chief of volunteer services, and was pinned by his father, and Entiat Fire Chief Mike Asher. Concluding the pinning ceremony was Ed Bleitz, who has been assigned as Chaplain.
As Fire Chief Tim Lemon began his monthly reporting, he briefly began describing his previous meeting with the City Administrator on the requested false alarm ordinance, but “he is not in favor of it,” said Lemon, “as he put it to me, typically the false alarm ordinances are kind of a negative pressure issue that goes against businesses with protection systems that are required by the city to be put in, and now they’re putting another layer of pressure on them to keep them maintained. So, you have that negative connotation of the whole deal, so then you have the different business owners out there putting pressure on the councilmembers and it becomes real uncomfortable scenario for them. What he has told me is that it will go to council for a decision as to whether or not they will pursue it. I just told him we just need a yes or no as to whether we’re going to pursue this or not.” The station is still working with one of the local resorts that has been known to have frequent false alarms, however, and are working to get all smoke detectors up to code and working effectively.
The Chief continued into his report, talking to the commissioners about the firefighter’s success with the three recent fires, Union Valley, GrandView on the Lake and the last at Lakeside. The response time and time it took for the crew to contain the fires were really impressive, said Lemon.
Moving into training, Deputy Chief Donnell began explaining the work the crew has put into the Tactical Response Plan, and how it has already benefited in a fire situation. The Tactical Response Plan has been assigned one per shift per member, and “we’ve actually been doing presentations on those,” he explained, “we’re actually pretty fortunate because one of the ones that we had already (completed) was GrandView,” he continued, “if you talked to Lt. Woods, who happened to be on the shift at the GrandView, he’ll tell you that the beauty of having the hazmat presentation in mind was that he knew that he had to go over the bridge off of Woodin and he knew exactly where the connection was to the GrandView and where the area (fire) was at there, and was able to direct everybody. It worked like clockwork.” Moving forward, the crew will still be assigning one per shift, then beginning in March will begin doubling that, he said. The various buildings have different response plans, and buildings such as the GrandView and Campbell’s Resort, explained Donnell, are considered to have multiple occupancies (each building is an occupancy) and are also considered high-risk occupancies due to the amount of people in each area. The response plans allow the emergency crews to already be familiarized with a business’ layout and individualized or abnormal needs.
Chelan Fire and Rescue meets every second Wednesday at 4 p.m. at Station 71. The next commissioner’s meeting will take place, Wednesday, Feb. 14.

Chelan, Fire and Rescue, district 7, meetings

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