Emergency Services by Joey Stocking (Fire)

 I’ll do my educational part first this time and do my story second.

Four different fire districts exist in Rich County - Garden City Fire, Laketown Fire, Randolph Fire, and Woodruff Fire. Each has a Fire Chief and volunteer firefighters who carry pagers & use a smart phone app for incident alerts. Each town has a fire shed that houses firefighting apparatus and equipment. Each district has mutual aid agreements in place, so they can help each other when the individual fire district is overwhelmed. All four districts are setup for structural firefighting as well as wildland firefighting. Some districts also include capabilities such as rope rescue, ice rescue, water rescue, extrication (jaws of life), and hazmat response.

Additionally, our county has a Fire Warden and Deputy Fire Warden who specialize in wildland fires and serves as a liaison between the county and state when additional resources are needed.

In the last few years fire personnel in Rich County have responded to incidents that have included rolled over fuel trucks needing hazmat containment, a 3 level condo fire, a 14,000 acre wildland fire, water rescues on Bear Lake, a rope rescue assisting Cache County, and a townhome fire that involved a fatality. Once or twice a month, month after month, these volunteers meet and train to keep their skills and knowledge current.

Personally, I’m claustrophobic. I do not enjoy wearing the heavy firefighting “turnouts”, the air tank, and having an SCBA mask covering my face. I’m the oddball out on the Garden City Fire District (GCFD). All the others seem to thrive on getting geared up and running into burning buildings or smoky wildfires. I’ll suit up and do what is required to help, but it just isn’t my favorite.

I do, however, love the other parts of being part of GCFD. I love the rope, ice, and water rescues. I thoroughly enjoy the camaraderie with my fellow volunteers. But one thing that I really enjoy is flying the sUAS.

What is a sUAS? Small Unmanned Aerial System. Most people call it a drone. The GCFD drone is equipped with a thermal camera that has proven to be quite useful on both structure fires and wildfires. It even has a spotlight that came in handy in lighting the way for wildland firefighters that had to traverse some rough terrain in the dark to get to a fire. I love technology and the quick advancement in sUAS technology has made for a remarkable tool in firefighting. I think someday soon we will look back and think ‘how did we fight fires before we had sUAS to assist us?' 

Do you have a skill that you think could contribute to your town's fire district? Are you willing to learn new skills? Interested in learning more about what is involved with being a firefighter in Rich County? Fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/BLKAuG5o1KWPRZDb9

Check out the below video that shows sUAS's use on a house fire here in Rich County. It shows the hot spots that we would not have known about otherwise and how it helped us to direct hose lines to the needed places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGq0VufzCgE