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Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad April 21, 2005 Residents make first response A large volunteer-driven effort has started a Greensprings Fire and Rescue Department By Jennifer Squires Ashland Daily Tidings A motorcycle accident over the winter occurred down Highway 66 and the victim, who didn’t live on the mountain, was taken to the Greensprings Inn. He was shaking from shock and had a broken collar bone, but survived the wreck. Fire Chief Steve Avgeris cleans his wildland urban interface type 3 engine before parking it in the station Monday. Orville Hector | The Associated Press “After that happened, I got to thinking, ‘What if the emergency was a lot worse?’” said inn owner Jennifer Hanor, who helped care for the man until an ambulance arrived. “It’s been talked about a lot.” Year after year, lightning fires, car accidents and medical calls have emergency personnel scurrying along the curves of Highway 66. The remote community of approximately 200 people who live in the Greensprings — at least 45 minutes away from emergency services — have kicked around the idea of creating their own fire and rescue operation for years. “We just really, right now, want to get trained people on the scene,” said Gordon Brown, and a trained EMT who is the board vice president of the two-month-old volunteer Greensprings Fire and Rescue. “It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel. We have a lot of people and they know what to do.” Other remote communities can relate to the concern among Greensprings residents. The 300 or so residents along Colestin Road, a dirt road between the Mount Ashland Ski Road and Hilt, Calif. were likewise motivated to start a fire district by a 1,000-acre forest fire on Aug. 10, 1981. The fire, started by children playing with matches, consumed a couple of structures before it was contained. “We had no telephones when that fire happened. There was a delay in reporting the fire,” said Colestin Rural Fire District Chief Steve Avegris, who started the fire department in 1982 with his wife, Cheri. “If we would have had fire protection here, close by, we would have stood a good chance of picking up that fire before it was a half acre.” How it’s done The Colestin RFD survived through donations for the first 13 years it protected the 21-square-mile area that swathes across the Siskiyous at the Oregon-California border. Ten years ago, the fire district created a tax base that provides stable funding for the organization. “It’s very difficult to get started,” said Steve Avegris, whose family has lived in the area since 1917. “We had a lot of help from Jackson County fire, Ashland fire and Medford fire.” Fire Sprawl The mountainous region along the Oregon/California border creates a vast area for emergency personnel to cover. A large volunteer-driven effort by the residents of Greensprings could soon offer additional, needed support. Now, the all-volunteer Colestin Rural Fire District operates on a $25,000 annual budget generated by tax revenues. The 28 volunteers augment the budget through grant writing and donations, which helped the department purchase a four-wheel-drive wildland-urban interface engine from the Oregon Department of Forestry. The all-purpose Type 3 rig runs upwards of $70,000, but the department received $58,000 from FEMA and an additional $6,500 from the Neil McDonald Foundation. The truck waits for calls in the fire station on the Oregon side of the border, just across Colestin Road from the Avegris residence. The Colestin RFD has a second station near Hilt, although crews from both stations may respond to a call. The fire district averages 50 calls a year, about 60 percent medical emergencies, including car accidents. Most of the fire calls are wildfires started by lightning strikes in the summer. “Response time, out here, on average is about 15 to 30 minutes,” Steve Avegris said. “Probably one of the biggest problems we have is having people available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The fire district has nine volunteers certified as first responders, which is one level below an EMT. Cheri Avegris is one of the two EMTs on the crew, and everyone else is a certified firefighter. The Colestin RFD averages four responders per call, which are dispatched through 9-1-1 services in Oregon and California. “We have to follow the same rules and regulations” as paid crews, Steve Avegris said. “When you’re a volunteer, you have to live a normal life, too. You have a job.” Getting dialed in The 70-plus volunteers with the Greensprings fire operation are working on training and lining up funding through donations and grant writing. Volunteer firefighters must earn all of the certification paid crews receive, such as first-responder medical training, CPR and first aid. The classes are expensive and time consuming, especially for an organization such as the Greensprings FD, which is run entirely with donations at this point. Due to the high volunteer turnout, several of the training courses will be held at the Greensprings Inn during the next month or two. Jennifer and Adam Hanor offered the inn as a community resource until the fire district has a firehouse to work from. “Right now we’re kind of like a church that doesn’t have a building,” said Brown, who believes the knowledge, resources and desire to establish a volunteer fire-and-rescue crew exists even if the group doesn’t have a firehouse or the OK to respond to 9-1-1 calls yet. “In the meantime, we don’t want to let that stop us. I’d hate to see somebody die up here before we have everything set up officially.” The Greensprings area is considered frontier land by the state, which means an emergency response team could take up to two hours and, during bad winter weather, crews may never make it. The Oregon Department of Forestry technically covers the area, but ODF’s first focus is controlling wildland fires. It’s easy to see why this Greensprings effort has the support of emergency personnel. “It benefits everyone,” said Jackson County Fire District 5 Engineer Bob Holt. “It allows us to use limited resources to get the most bang for our buck, in the event of a large fire such a structure fire or a wildland fire — that other departments are automatically programed to respond to us for assistance.” When established, the Greensprings FD plans to provide assistance to people from the Oregon-California border north to Dead Indian Memorial Road and from the Greensprings Summit (milepost 15.5 on Hwy. 99) east to Copco Road (milepost 25), although the group estimates it’ll probably respond as far as east the Klamath County line. Brown responds to between 10 and 15 medical emergencies a year because people know to call him when there’s a car accident or a woman goes into labor prematurely. Gene Davies, the board president and chief of the department, has discovered, pinpointed and reported five wildfires in the last five years. Two current firefighters, four registered nurses, an EMT and several retired firefighters and paramedics live on the mountain. The community already has at least four tender trucks, which carry water, that individuals have purchased for community use. Three are approved for fighting fires. “It’s completely community-based and we’re not forcing anyone to participate,” Jennifer Hanor said. “It’s just an organic effort.” The fire department wants to find a way to be connected to the 9-1-1 system to act as a first-responder unit that could start to control a fire, locate a car that has run off the road or provide initial medical treatment while Jackson County Fire District 5 or Mercy Flights is en route. “We have such a tremendous resource that will benefit the state of Oregon and Jackson County,” Davies said. “It’ll be permanently a work in progress.” For more information about the Greensprings FD, contact the Hanors at 482-0614 or [email protected]. For more information about the Colestin RFD, contact the Avgerises at 488-1768. Staff writer Jennifer Squires can be reached at 482-3456 x 3019 or [email protected]. --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.