YACOLT — Tom McDowell’s storied career with Clark County Fire District 13 — then North Country Emergency Medical Service, and then the Volcano Rescue Team — arguably started with a burning chicken coop.
He was on his way home from his job as Clark County undersheriff around 1971 when a fire was reported in Yacolt, he recalled.
At that point, he said, the town of some 500 people didn’t have much of a fire department.
“They set off a siren, someone goes and calls on the telephone, finds out where the fire is, tells everyone where the fire is and where everybody’s supposed to go,” he said of the process.
He had some experience as a volunteer firefighter in Oregon and was trying to help a responding deputy coordinate things.
“They couldn’t get the firetruck started, so they had to jump-start it with a police car,” McDowell said.
By the time he made it to the scene, which was just outside of town, the coop had burned to the ground.
If there’s a fire, people expect some kind of response, but there’s only so much a deputy can do, he said. The sheriff’s office decided it couldn’t respond to fires outside the city limits for liability reasons, and he presented the case to the town council.
“Of course that didn’t make them feel too good, but we didn’t want our butts hanging out a mile, if you will,” he said.
Two days later, McDowell got a call from the mayor with an offer to be the new fire chief. He accepted.
“That’s kind of where it started,” he said. “We just built it from there. Did some drills and practice, and things got squared away, and people got some pride in the organization.”
“It’s from there to here.”
The fire district, ambulance service and mountain rescue service are all, essentially, the same entity. McDowell, after 47 years with the district, seeing it through its founding and the creation of its ambulance and mountain rescue services, will retire at the end of the month.
Looking back, there wasn’t much time to think about what all these projects might pan out to be.
“Too busy thinking of everything else that needed to get done,” he said.
Law enforcement start
McDowell’s working life actually started in law enforcement. He grew up in Hillsboro, Ore., and a first aid-related program through his P.E. class connected him with a sheriff’s deputy who was a part-time EMT. Their friendship helped spark his interest in the work, he said.
He went to Washington State University to study police science and management, then went to work for the Multnomah County, then Washington County sheriffs’ offices in Oregon, after graduating. In 1970, he and his family moved to Idaho, where he worked at the state officer standards and training advisory body.
When Eugene Cotton was elected Clark County sheriff soon after, he asked McDowell to serve as his undersheriff.
McDowell was undersheriff until 1978, while also working as Yacolt’s fire chief. Later, when Fire District 13 was established, the Yacolt Fire Department merged with it.
He started North Country EMS in 1972 on a part-time basis with the help of volunteers and an old truck loaded with first-aid gear, and the district started getting members EMT training.
Mother of invention
Again, as with the fire department, needs in the community presented a gap in service.
He recalled a call in Chelatchie Prairie where a boy fell from the bed of a pickup as it took a sharp corner.
The boy died, and they had to wait five hours for an ambulance.
“We said, ‘Ugh, we’re not doing that anymore,’ ” he said. “We decided we were not going to talk about it, we were just going to do it.”
The district started raising money to get a real ambulance, and organizing a true emergency medical service, and they had their first ambulance on the road in 1976.
McDowell and one other volunteer, who was a janitor at the school, split shifts as the district’s only paramedics, he said.
Another need to address popped up when the Forest Service reopened Mount St. Helens to hikers in 1986.
“We’re sitting back here saying, ‘Oh my gosh. Who’s going to handle all of that?’ ” he said. “Of course, we said we will.”
Since then, the all-volunteer and self-sustaining Volcano Rescue Team is now one of the few of its kind with an accreditation from the national Mountain Rescue Association, able to perform search-and-rescue operations along with cave rescues, avalanche response and high-angle technical rescues.
“It’s been a lifesaver for a number of folks, and that always makes you feel good,” he said.
McDowell joked that he’s been unemployed for, at most, about a half-hour.
He made the switch to emergency medicine full-time in 1978. When Cotton wasn’t re-elected, that left McDowell out of a job. The district commissioners quickly offered him a paid job as chief.
“I’ve never been unemployed for more than a day that I can remember. I always had the motto, you don’t quit one job till you get another,” he said.
He’ll stay on as a volunteer, helping coordinate the Volcano Rescue Team after he retires, he said. The district will even let him keep his office, which houses his bulletin-board wall of photos of district memories and past employees and volunteers.
His wife, Dianne, is long retired from teaching, and two of their three adult children live in the area.
His house is about a mile out of town, with a horse and chicken, and there are likely about 40-some years of honey-dos that’ll need tending to, he said.
He’s been asking himself what he’ll miss the most for a while, he said, or if he’ll be able to resist poking his head into the office.
Part of what kept him with it for so long, he said, was the excitement. Routines don’t last long in firefighting, search and rescue or ambulance services.
“I kind of wonder how I’m going to get along without it,” he said, smiling. “I’ll probably call you and tell you in a couple months how it goes.”
