NASELLE – Each year Pacific County Fire District No. 4’s first responders, 30 firefighters and 10 EMTs respond to approximately 100 fire and medical emergency calls throughout a 30-mile radius, encompassing the Willapa Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the Nemah hatchery, 10 miles up Salmon Creek and the 12-mile stretch of Highway 401 to the bridge.

With such a wide area to cover, the district’s dedicated employees and volunteers are vital to the service the department provides.

“We have a great core group of responders, our firefighters are really good about keeping their radios on all the time,” explains secretary and first responder Carol Haven. “Plus they’re loggers, they know all about bracing things and hooking up the hoist which works well for extrication. We’re lucky that we do have a fairly active group which is nice, but we’re always looking for more people and more for EMS.”

In addition to medical services and fire rescue, the men and women of District No. 4 go through countless hours of training to keep up with standards, and also inspect schools for fire safety requirements and provide safety training classes for area children.

Dedicated service for 31 yearsOne of Naselle’s many dedicated individuals from past years is John Alves, who currently serves as a district fire commissioner. For 31 years, Alves served as a volunteer firefighter, and for 20 of those years, he was an emergency medical technician.

A resident of Naselle since 1952, Alves says he thinks the Naselle fire department was started in the early 1950s with only a flatbed truck and a tank secured to the back.

“We didn’t have an ambulance in those days, there wasn’t any need for one,” remembers Alves, who was encouraged by his father-in-law to get involved with the department in 1965. “We didn’t form an ambulance group until 1966 … We all took courses and came out of it with 24 EMTs, in fact we had the largest amount of EMTs per capita than anywhere else in the state – for a little while at least. We started out with a ’55 Packard for an ambulance, then later we acquired an Oldsmobile station wagon, then a Suburban and eventually an ambulance. We were receiving more ambulance calls than fire calls, and we served areas as far as the western half of Wahkiakum County. In 1965, the department started to fund the ambulance service by holding annual smorgasbords, and that supported us until the EMS system levies came around in the 1980s.”

“The biggest thing over past years is that we would only have about eight to 12 chimney or house fire calls, the center of the department was the ambulance calls for medical emergencies and motor vehicle accidents. We often covered calls beyond our area but always had good response and a lot of help.”

Fire hall constructed in 1989In 1989, the department erected the fire hall that still shelters the emergency vehicles today. Though now the district fights fires with a 1975 pumper and a much newer pumper, Naselle area firefighters started their effort with a 1955 GMC pumper and another vehicle that Alves best describes as “a big clunker.” Grants from the Templin Foundation and other organizations have provided the district with radios and breathing apparatuses.

Alves recalls one particular house fire as being very exciting in his memory. After receiving word of a daytime house fire, the firefighter quickly responded, only to find one other firefighter, Charles Torppa, at the scene. Waiting for others to arrive, the men saw that the house was pitch black with smoke and neither one of them knew if the house was occupied. After braving the heat, smoke and flames, Torppa and Alves found the only occupants of the residence – a couple of terrified kittens on the back porch, which they carried to safety before the fire was doused with the help of arriving firefighters.

Looking back, Alves says the department has had many great leaders in its day, such as Art Andring and Merle Hall, and chiefs Bud Nelson (a former Naselle postmaster), Jack See, Eric McDaniels, Don Soule and “Slim” Krenshaw.

Working on address issueLike other area departments, members of District No. 4 are working on installing residential address posts. After a few trial runs and more scheduling, the district plans to install the white, reflective posts for the residents of Naselle and neighboring areas for a $20 donation to cover the cost of materials.

“Hopefully we can get all of our residences marked, it would be a big saver for us, specifically for the EMS side of our calls,” says Haven, whose husband, Bert, has been a part of District No. 4’s EMS staff for 18 years. “We’ve had such a huge influx of people and development in areas. What started out with having two residences now have five, and they all have the same driveway and we don’t know where the residence is. We often have to ask for landmarks when we can’t find it. It will be a huge help for us … There’s so many new roads, we don’t know if residences are there and we can’t see their house numbers that far off the road.”

In August, the district received a FEMA Assistance for Firefighters vehicle acquisition grant for $185,000 for a fire tender, a vehicle designed to transport additional amounts of water to the scene of a fire.

For more information about volunteering with the Pacific County Fire District No. 4, contact Chief Doug Sandell at 360-484-3264.