Clark County firefighters aid in wildfire response around Northwest

Firefighters taking part in battle against wildfires

• Camas-Washougal Fire Department: 4

• Clark County Fire & Rescue: 13

• Clark County Fire District 3: 3

• Clark County Fire District 10: 2

• Clark County Fire District 13: 6

• East County Fire & Rescue: 2

• Vancouver Fire Department: 2

Thirty-two fire personnel from Clark County fire agencies, along with a five local Red Cross volunteers, are currently deployed to help with wildfires around the Northwest.

While some agencies say they’re not very affected by the smaller staff, others say that helping out has spread their crews thin.

Clark County Fire & Rescue currently has 13 firefighters working on the forest fires, most of which are helping suppression at the Kettle Complex Wildfire, a fire burning more than 45,000 acres in the Colville National Forest.

“It’s a challenge for us, of course, because then everyone else has to work harder back here,” Clark County Fire & Rescue spokesman Tim Dawdy said. “We would never allow our stations to become lower staffed or unmanned.”

Dawdy said that there is also a benefit for those living in the local fire district from such deployments. Firefighters learn to work a larger operation and a different kind of fire than they normally would.

“They gain a ton of valuable experience that they are able to apply to our emergency scenes at home,” he said. “It’s experience that they’d take a lifetime to receive, but that they get in one season.”

At the same time, Dawdy said, the agency is able to help out where needed.

“We really take our obligation to help our neighbors seriously, and they’re in dire straits right now,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of hurting people across the state, and we think helping them is the right thing to do.”

Vancouver Fire Department has two crews deployed to wildfires, though normally the agency doesn’t send any firefighters due to labor negotiations and because they need all of the fire vehicles they own. The two crews deployed don’t have Vancouver fire vehicles with them.

“We just don’t have the extra apparatus to send away,” Capt. Scott Willis said. “We’re so busy right now, we wouldn’t be able to send any of our resources, just because they’re being used so much here.”

Camas-Washougal Fire Department has four firefighters deployed to Eastern Washington wildfires.

Chief Nick Swinhart said that staffing levels aren’t affected as deployed positions are filled with overtime, a cost which is then reimbursed by the state.

“This way, the community doesn’t suffer from lack of coverage,” he said.

While this applies to all crews that accrue overtime, some smaller agencies say the overtime assistance from the state doesn’t help them since they rely heavily on volunteers.

‘Important role’

Fire District 13 has six personnel supporting crews at the Okanogan Complex Wildfire, where they are manning a communication module. Officials there say it’s hard to recruit more volunteers to help out.

Similarly, Chief Gordon Brooks of Clark County Fire District 10 said that keeping people to cover local fires can be difficult when crews are deployed around the state.

“As a small agency, everyone plays an important role,” he said. “It does make it more difficult for more people at home. … We count on the rest of our volunteer staff to give more and they have real lives and everything, it makes it harder.”

And some agencies have been feeling the effects of missing staff for the entire summer.

East County Fire & Rescue Chief Dean Thornberry said his agency currently has two firefighters deployed to the Kettle Complex. Between two and three firefighters have been gone since June, he said.

“This has been a long season and our people are stretched thin, people are tired,” he said.

Thornberry said he expects the trend to continue through September.

A group of Red Cross volunteers from west of the Cascades, including the five from the Southwest Washington chapter, have been traveling city to city, working with shelter and relief efforts ahead of wildfires in Oregon.

Paula Fasano Negele, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross Cascades Region, said local volunteers were helping displaced community members at a shelter in Warm Springs, Ore., late last week.

A couple of days went by and the nearby County Line 2 fire, which has since grown to more than 100 square miles, forced the shelter to evacuate south to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Madras.

About 30 people were coming daily to the shelter, she said.

Negele, speaking from a Red Cross relief operation set up at a church in John Day, Ore., said there are about three to five local volunteers with the group fielded from the Cascades Region.

The Warm Springs shelter operation closed Thursday afternoon, and many of the volunteers moved on to help with relief efforts further east.

Negele said the group arrived in John Day on Friday, unloaded, took a short break, and were on their way to Enterprise, Ore., that afternoon to help people there dealing with the 75-square mile Grizzly Bear Complex fire.

“These people are so fantastic, these volunteers,” she said.

Volunteers agree to go out for up to two weeks, and often have little idea where they’re going or what’s needed when sent out, she said.

Every major fire emergency has been different, she said.

“What’s the same is always, in a really memorable way, is our volunteers.”

The Red Cross is far from the only nonprofit involved in the effort. The Salvation Army’s Northwest Division sent nine people from Western Washington to aid victims of wildfires in Washington and Idaho, though no volunteers have yet been called up from Clark County, said Steve Rusk, The Salvation Army’s director of community relations and development in Vancouver.