House fire renews fire-department flap

A Sunday evening house fire in Stillwater Estates that forced a family of five to seek temporary lodging also is opening old wounds between local fire departments.

Thomas and Michelle Shaffer and their children — two sons, ages 13 and 10, and a 9-year-old daughter — escaped safely but lost their three-car garage, a loft bedroom overhead and an adjacent laundry room in the blaze that started in the garage.

The rest of the house has varying degrees of smoke and water damage. The family has homeowner’s insurance, Michelle Shaffer said Monday.

“I appreciate all the effort that the fire departments put in for us,” she said. “They did a good job, and I appreciate all they did with … getting this under control.”

Still, others raised questions Sunday night as to why a firefighting response seemed slow in coming. Stillwater Estates lies just north of Kalispell along West Reserve Drive, one minute’s response time away from the staffed Kalispell Fire Station 62 on Reserve Loop.

But the subdivision lies in the West Valley Fire District, which has a fire hall 3 miles to the west where volunteer firefighters report for their gear and trucks before responding to emergency calls.

Fire chiefs cited the lack of a mutual aid agreement and fire calls that are dispatched on separate channels for rural districts and the Kalispell municipal district.

Michelle Shaffer’s initial report of the fire came into Flathead County 911 dispatch at 5:58 p.m. Sunday. West Valley

Fire Chief Rod Dresbach, who was at Flathead Valley Community College at the time, said he reached the home at 6:06 p.m. His first firefighting truck was on the scene at 6:17 p.m.

Both Smith Valley and South Kalispell fire departments — rural districts with mutual aid agreements — also were paged to the scene with the initial call. Kalispell Fire Chief Dan Diehl said South Kalispell firefighters reached the home at 6:21 p.m. Sunday. A time wasn’t immediately available for Smith Valley’s arrival.

Shuttling children to different locations on Monday, Shaffer recounted the events of Sunday evening.

She said she was standing in the kitchen when she smelled “something funny.” A haze in the laundry room and a noise beyond its door into the garage prompted her to crack open that door. She saw a bright orange glow and felt a pressure difference before slamming it shut.

Shaffer told the two younger children to get into the truck parked outside in the driveway — she had been preparing to take her daughter to an event in another half-hour — then fetched her eldest son from the bathtub.

As they backed out of the driveway she dialed 911 to report the fire, then parked on the street and alerted neighbors of the potential danger.

The next phone call was to her husband, who had been visiting his mother in Kalispell. He arrived perhaps 10 or 15 minutes later, she said.

The West Valley fire chief was first on the scene. Trucks began arriving 20 minutes after the report, and firefighters plunged into their work.

Diehl said his crews at Station 62 in north Kalispell and at Station 61 in downtown Kalispell wouldn’t have known the fire was under way.

“They dispatch West Valley and the rural departments on a different channel” from Kalispell calls, Diehl said. “So we have no notification that the fire is only one minute away. The fire chief has to request assistance from us.”

That request didn’t come, he said. He added that Evergreen Fire Chief Craig Williams, whose department is a straight shot about 3 miles to the east, didn’t get a request, either.

“The travesty of the system is that we need to be calling the closest fire agencies to be able to provide services to those in need, regardless of whose district it is,” Diehl said. He expects that problem to be solved when the consolidated 911 dispatch center opens in the coming months. He added that departments traditionally charge no fees when providing mutual aid.

When contacted about an hour after the fire was reported Sunday night, dispatchers noted that Kalispell firefighters were on a medical call at that time — “but still, there were eight more in the station,” Diehl said, and could have sent backup. Kalispell was not on a medical call at the time of the initial report, he said.

“One of these issues we have to work on is trying to break down these borders related to calling for help,” he said. “We are going to ask anybody and everybody that is able to help.”

Several years ago a concern over Kalispell’s annexations of rural areas prompted concerns that rural districts’ territory, and therefore tax revenue, was being eroded. It was driven by development, Diehl said, not by fire departments. But he cited what he called an unwritten code that “if you need help we are going to provide all the help we can, in order to provide services to people who need it.”

It was “a shame,” he said, that a home burning so close to Kalispell didn’t get immediate protection from that station.

“We’ve been working with West Valley a lot,” Diehl said, “and I was actually kind of surprised that that happened.”

He said he’s asked for an after-action investigation from the 911 governing board and the Flathead County Commissioners.

“I don’t think this is the best for the community in the future,” he said. “I’m definitely going to call for help when we need it. No one can do it all themselves.”

Dresbach explained his decision to fight the fire with his own resources, noting that it probably produced better results than a shared effort.

“I need to clarify that we do not have a mutual aid agreement with the city of Kalispell,” Dresbach said. “In 2002 we went to the city council to say we are not going to sign a mutual aid with Kalispell.”

Since that time, he said, “there have been a couple meetings back and forth. The last one was in 2005, and then it was put in the city of Kalispell’s ballpark.” Although there’s no agreement, he said Kalispell has made it clear that West Valley would receive any firefighting help requested.

“I didn’t request it,” Dresbach said.

But there’s a good reason for that decision, he continued. It has to do with conflicting methods and equipment they use in fighting fires.

“They didn’t have any equipment I needed,” he said. “A lot of tactics we are using are different from the city of Kalispell’s. We use compressed-air foam. Kalispell uses straight water.”

The surfactant in the foam makes the water wetter and more effective, he said, producing much faster results and drastically reducing the amount of water needed to fight a fire.

Dresbach cited Evergreen’s use of what he said was in excess of 80,000 gallons of water to fight a fire that gutted a house Friday morning.

“Evergreen completely lost that structure,” he said, pointing out the difference in tactics, not the skill of the firefighters. “We went into this fire last night and used less than 10,000 gallons of water by using compressed-air foam. We can get a quicker knock-down; we’re making the water work for us better.”

He didn’t call Kalispell Sunday because of conflicts between those two methods while jointly working fires in the past, he said.

“While we were putting foam on it, they were using water and washing it all away,” Dresbach said.

“Can they possibly get a faster response? Yes,” he added. “But maybe not.”

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