C.F. firefighters balk at automatic aid plan

By NANCY KIMBALL

The Daily Inter Lake

A request for an automatic aid agreement with the Kalispell Fire Department stirred up some concern in Columbia Falls this week.

Kalispell is asking fire departments in Bigfork, Evergreen, Whitefish and Columbia Falls to send a fire engine and three firefighters to Kalispell when needed on fires in commercial buildings. Kalispell would reciprocate, but send three firefighters with a ladder truck instead.

The response would be automatic, taking the agreement beyond mutual-aid responses provided for in Montana code and written mutual-aid agreements between cities.

Bigfork already approved the agreement, putting it into effect on May 31.

Columbia Falls Fire Chief Robert Webber supports the idea and presented the request to the City Council on Monday night.

He said it would provide a level of response that, in some instances, Columbia Falls city and rural departments could not provide alone. Support would arrive more quickly than if incident commanders waited until firefighters on the scene needed help, he added.

"In most cases," Webber wrote in his memo to the mayor and council, "the first crew to make it to the scene of a commercial fire call will end up canceling the incoming units due to a lack of need for the additional help, but in the cases where the emergency is a bona-fide fire, the crew and the equipment needed for the response is already on the road, opposed to just being requested."

"The rural department agrees with this," Webber told the council Monday night, "but five volunteers reportedly are opposed."

The contract could be amended to call out firefighters only when a fire has been confirmed, he said, rather than disturbing them with emergency pages every time a call comes in to the station.

But council member and former Fire Chief Don Barnhart pulled out "a long list of reasons to oppose this," he told Webber.

"The mutual aid agreement already provides all we need," Barnhart said. "It seems Kalispell could be asking something unwarranted."

He was joined by firefighters association president Brad Peterson.

"We are all for mutual aid,"

Peterson said, "but 97 percent [of Columbia Falls firefighters] are opposed to automatic mutual aid … We already get a lot of false alarms."

The men also contrasted Kalispell's department of about 35 paid members with Columbia Falls' department of 26 volunteer firefighters and one paid chief.

Although Dan Diehl, Kalispell's assistant fire chief in charge of operations, said the intent is to send out a call for mutual aid only for a confirmed fire, language in the contract offered to Columbia Falls does not specify that.

The contract calls on Columbia Falls for "a single Class A engine with a minimum staffing of three (3) personnel on all general alarm commercial structure fires within the areas protected by the City (Kalispell)."

The responding department would be released from an automatic-aid fire when its services are no longer needed or when its equipment and firefighters are needed in its own jurisdiction.

The contract states the agreement "shall work in concert with and create an addition to the Flathead County Mutual Assistance Agreement currently in effect."

Diehl refuted the impression that Columbia Falls firefighters would be called for Kalispell's false alarms as well as confirmed fires.

Automatic "mutual aid would only work on confirmed working fires on commercial structures in Kalispell," Diehl said. "They would not be responding to alarms, only when it is a confirmed active fire."

Faced with the opposition on Monday night, City Council members held only a brief discussion before referring the matter to the Public Safety Committee. Barnhart, Mayor Jolie Fish and council member Harvey Reikofski are on the committee.

They will meet at 6:30 p.m. June 26 in City Hall.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com