2024 an active year for fire department and EMA

The Red Oak Fire Department and Montgomery County Emergency Management Agency had an active 2024.
Red Oak Fire Chief John Bruce said that of the numerous calls received for assistance, emergency medical service calls remained the highest volume.
“We have our EMS calls, and then our large coverage area for EMS is still a thing. The rural areas are still struggling with volunteerism and retention of folks due to the large amount of certification and recertification it takes to maintain EMS licenses. There’s just a low number of EMS providers available in the rural communities for sure,” said Bruce.
Bruce described the training process volunteers had to follow just to get their certification.
“There’s the initial schooling, travel for that schooling, skills, and the call volume itself. We have some communities that are well over 200 calls per year, that’s horrific for a volunteer organization, and these calls don’t come in during regular hours. They come in at all times of the day and night, and in varying amounts. You’re seeing volunteerism dwindle down tremendously. Even volunteer firefighter numbers are going down. We’re at about 120 hours of training for a Firefighter I course, but that’s twice a week training, travel to the skill sites, and are trying to work jobs and/or be moms and dads. Red Oak is classified as a combination department of career, part-time, and volunteer firefighters, but we probably only have a handful or less on the department that are true volunteers,” advised Bruce.
With the changes in Red Oak city government, Bruce felt that they’d be able to take a look at coverage for rural areas this year.
“Now we have a city administrator in Lisa Kotter, and we’ve got a city clerk with the hiring of Ashley Wilson, we’ve got these folks in position, learning their roles very quickly. Maybe then we can reevaluate our system and see what modifications need to take place,” Bruce explained. “There’s always the financial part, but then also there’s the staff coverage. If you don’t have your crew here and they’re somewhere else, then you’re reliant upon callback, which is always questionable. You have to examine what that staffing model looks like from minute to minute, because you don’t know who’s in town, who’s not in town so far. It is challenging and it raises its own set of issues, but like I said, now we’ll have a team that can approach that and evaluate it and come up with something better, hopefully, going forward.”
The Red Oak Fire Department has implemented a three-call paging system which has been very beneficial, as they now know that there’s somebody responding among the three departments getting paged.
“The three pages for a working fire assignment. That way, rest assured, if you’re the primary agency, you have help coming. It’s worked out great. All the chiefs have praised it. And as it stands right now, everyone’s absolutely 100% on board that we’re just going to maintain it. There’s no reason to have to change it. It just really covers a lot of things. It really makes it more comforting for the volunteer agencies, because they know there’s somebody coming from one of the other departments for sure. It’s definitely a good change,” stated Bruce.
While the area didn’t have a lot of snow events last year, the two major events that did occur dumped more than a foot of snow. Bruce said winter weather always causes more stress.
“Any time you get that level of snow, you get nervous with your responses, just for the mere fact that now we have umpteen inches of snow that these trucks have got to try to make their way through. One snow event, we did have smoke in a house clear south of town and just west of Highway 48. Thankfully, the road grader was working that road. But their responses get challenging with the road services. Some of these trucks are very large. They’re not all-wheel drive. Then, of course, your temperatures, anything below freezing, is going to make your water change to ice. So that can affect the pumps on the trucks. That can affect staff, fire ground operations, water supply. It creates its own challenges,” Bruce advised.
On the flip side, with it being rural Iowa, there are methods in place to help combat some of it.
“It puts your planning into perspective, especially in those big winter storms or severe weather. Those relationships that you have, the planning that you do ahead of time, doing the exercises that are done throughout the years, it all goes into play because, when there’s a major winter storm, a lot of snow we may have extra staff on duty. We may have a city snow plow in the building or secondary roads on call,” stated Hamman. “If we have to go out in that rural setting in town it’s a different story in all of our towns. But the minute we go outside of city limits you never know what you’re going to encounter, especially in the middle of the night. There’s a lot of back-end stuff that the people don’t see. They see the trucks out there, they see the lights flashing, but they never see what goes on behind the closed doors prior to the events.”
Bruce and Hamman didn’t just have to deal with snowfall. Red Oak and Montgomery County were also hit with a tornado that caused damage, but thankfully, no injuries.
“That quickly arose from the City of Red Oak being hit to Montgomery County being hit. And then on top of that, we lost a communications tower, a tornado went right through and took it out, right in the heat of things. We were doing search and rescue operations to make sure that we didn’t have any victims. But even with the tower lost, the system did what it was supposed to do. We never lost communications. The shortfalls are few and far between. There’s certain areas you can tell you’re losing some of the presence of that tower. So getting that tower back ASAP is imperative, but we move at the speed of insurance and construction,” Bruce said.
Hamman said that the repair process for the tower will soon be getting underway.
“We’re moving forward finally. We’ve started to receive some of our antennas, our coaxial lines that run up the tower. The microwave dishes have been ordered. There’s a couple things on the construction side that they’ve still got to do at the site. They have to do some site surveys before they can get the steel for the tower ordered, but we’re probably looking at an early to late spring construction anyway, so we still have time. Obviously, I would have liked to have seen it happen a lot sooner, but I still think from the day of the tornado to signing a contract to get the tower replaced, I don’t think that was really out of the question given what we were dealt and the complexity of everything that’s involved,” advised Hamman. “As of right now, we’re hoping everything’s back up online by July. My goal would be May. I would love for it to be in service at the year anniversary, but a lot’s going to depend on the weather, when they can get in and get the new footings poured. Because once they get the tower on site, they get it built and stacked it won’t take them more than probably three or four weeks by the time we get the different crews in because one stacks the tower, one puts the antennas, and one puts the microwave dishes on. The good thing is nothing at the site itself is compromised, so everything in the shelter stays the same.”
Based on the fact that there were multiple tornados on the ground, Hamman felt that everything that could go right in the situation did.
“We had a tornado very early that morning, then the big show happened that afternoon. Everyone has seen the path where the Red Oak tornado was going. It was going straight towards the early childhood center and the courthouse and then the downtown Red Oak area. If it had stayed on that course, we could have had significant injuries, or losses of life, or structural losses. As for the tornado near Villisca that hit Hacklebarney Park, if it would have been Friday or Saturday rather than Tuesday, that campground would have probably been packed. There were a number of things that could have went wrong but thankfully did not. I think we have a lot to be thankful for that day. Even though we had some significant damages across the county and a lot was lost,” commented Hamman.
Bruce said storm spotting is very much a collaborative effort in severe weather, as people need to know the storm’s path in real time.
“We have all the departments get activated. Every department is out storm spotting, every department’s responding to their areas. Brian was able to call in some EMA coordinators from other areas to come help with storm damage assessments, and everybody on the outlying areas is basically on standby, so if we need to pull additional resources in, we can. That’s just back to that teamwork that all the departments have. I mean, it’s a moment’s notice. Somebody calls for help. We go their way, or they come to us. And that’s why we have such an outstanding emergency services program in southwest Iowa,” Bruce said.
Based on the way things are being coordinated in the county, Bruce said he doesn’t see the need for a county-wide fire department any time soon.
“We have our program designed and operating now and it works very fluidly. The three department page out works great. All assignments are answered when they come in. We have two new fire chiefs starting in the county, Dave Riggle with the Villisca Fire Department and Brayton Allen with the Stanton Fire Department, so we look forward to working with them. Both gentlemen are very tenured with their departments, and they both bring a wealth of knowledge to the table and the transition I feel will be smooth. We look forward to working with them and they do with us as well,” stated Bruce.
As for infrastructure, Bruce said the renovations to the existing fore station remain a topic of conversation.
“The building is in dire need of TLC, or possibly a rebuild. That’s just a continuous discussion, and it will remain an active discussion. Equipment wise, we have the new grass truck should be here end of the month. So as far as response equipment, I think we’re sitting pretty good. Our full-time staffing model of four on a shift is still being worked towards. Now that we’ve got Lisa in there and we’ve got Ashley in there, now they can digest this and work with us to get this stuff. They all understand what’s being asked of the department,” explained Bruce. “It always comes down to funding. That’s always the magic part, but I think we have a team that will sit at the table and discuss the expectations of this department, the needs, and discuss how we bridge that gap so that we remain successful and we remain capable to take on these challenges that 2025 is going to bring us. We don’t know what it’s going to throw at us yet. But the kind of the business we’re in is to pre-plan and try to be as ready as we can and capable to respond and just really hit those challenges head on and provide what I would say is a really good service for rural Iowa and where we’re at.”
Bruce also said they are very thankful for all of the agencies around that assist as well in Montgomery County and the agencies in bordering counties that they train with and that they get to work with.
“We’re definitely making sure we maintain those relationships because that’s paramount to being successful. When it comes to our staffing, we have one position that’s going to come open that we’re going to need to fill. There’s two other positions that we would like to fill. We’re trying to go to four on a shift and that’s to help cover all these EMS calls because it can be taxing when two people are out of county. I’m confident now that we have the individuals in place and we can sit at the table and start discussing these things,” Bruce commented.
Lastly Bruce said they are ready to do whatever they need to be adaptive in the upcoming year.
“Between the talent we have in our agency, the talent in the agencies that we work with almost daily, and marrying up with what Brian brings to the table, I think we stand in a very good position to take care of our folks. We are very fortunate to have what we have,” said Bruce.