Benny Westcott
At the Sept. 19 Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District board meeting at Station 21, Fire Chief Nick Tyler shared that this summer SHFD personnel responded to the Moon Mountain, Hat Rock, Smith River, Tyee Ridge, and Lookout fires. SHFD has billed two of those fires so far for $20,273.
In all, SHFD personnel spent a total of 1,200 hours on those fires.
“For 1,200 hours, we had Sweet Home Fire represented in some other community helping some other homeowners,” Tyler said. “So I’m pretty proud of that.”
He noted that “We had help from the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office during the Wiley Fire. They brought in two different task forces for us when we needed help. So I kind of feel an obligation that when others need help we answer that call as well.”
Also at the meeting:
Firefighter/paramedic Christian Whitfield shared that SHFD started the community wildfire risk reduction project manager position on July 1.
“Our goals with that were to prepare our community and district for wildfires,” Whitfield said. “The two big fires that surrounded us – we don’t want that to happen to us.”
Whitfield met with Cascade Timber Consulting, the Oregon Department of Forestry, and the U.S. Forest Service to develop a plan to conduct defensible space assessments. Whitfield has already been going out to people’s homes to tell them what they can do to make their property more fire ready.
He said SHFD has a little bit of money for some tools and a dump trailer to help out with fire mitigation. “For people that truly can’t do it themselves, we’re going to offer a little bit of help there,” Whitfield said.
He added that the district has an interagency agreement with ODF to use their chipper, which saves the district money.
Whitfield said a goal is to start a community led program called Firewise USA.
“Our goal is to set up as many of those as we can and then be able to walk away and let them run it, because it runs itself with the guidance of ODF and the USFS,” Whitfield said.
He said that in the last two months the homeless population has started at least six working fires throughout the area.
He said SHFD was able to work with one landowner on 24th Avenue to put in some fuel breaks that stopped two fires.
“We’re going to work with them and others to continue the fuels mitigation on their property and potentially do some prescribed fires next spring,” he said.
Tyler said “I’m super excited to see what we can do for the community over the next year,” adding “I don’t think it’s futile. We saw in 2020 a fire get close. We saw this year [the] Wiley Fire was right up against our community. And it was one wind event away from blowing into our eastern community, or north or south wind into the Cascadia area.”
-The board voted unanimously to allow the district to spend $17,688 on a fire records management software called ESO. With recurring fees the software would cost about $15,000 annually.
The district currently uses software for EMS charting and fire documentation that’s free from the state.
Tyler said that the problem with that software is that it’s not very end user friendly and doesn’t allow for the easy extraction of data.
“Me being able to go in and extract information is the huge thing that I’m looking at,” Tyler said. “Operational levies and increasing personnel is a very normal conversation for a chief and crews to have. Everybody’s busy, everybody needs more people. But in my opinion, to go out for an operational levy right now without any data would be irresponsible. How do I prove that we need more people? If the voters give us more people, how do I prove that it was effective?
“We just don’t have the data to do that,” he continued. “So being able to look at that data in a more productive way is something that I think is important for our future.”
-Jonathan Lemar was sworn in as a new paramedic/firefighter for SHFD.
“I’ve known Jonathan for a long time and got to see him in Lebanon,” Tyler said. “He’s done a lot of good stuff in our organization, in Brownsville and in Lebanon and has been around the community. I’m super excited to have him full time, career, in house.”
Lemar, 34, was born in Springfield and raised in Sweet Home. He graduated from Sweet Home High School in 2008. After high school he attended Linn-Benton Community College and took general education classes until 2015. In 2015, he transferred to Chemeketa Community College, graduating in 2019 with an Associate of Science with an emphasis in paramedicine.
In 2015, Lemar became a volunteer firefighter with SHFD. The next year he was hired as a part-time EMT/firefighter with SHFD. In December of 2019, Lemar became a resident volunteer with the Brownsville Rural Fire District, and did that until September of 2022. He also worked at the Lebanon Fire Department starting in January of 2022 as a single role paramedic until August of 2022. Then he was moved from that position to paramedic/firefighter and worked that until August of 2023, when he was hired as a paramedic/firefighter with SHFD.