‘Trying to make it better’: Dave Patterson ready to retire as Grant County Fire District 8 chief

MATTAWA — Grant County Fire District 8 Chief Dave Patterson said he started his firefighting career as a volunteer, and it was as a volunteer that he joined Grant County Fire District 8.

After 12 years with the district, and about 40 years in firefighting, he will retire Friday.

“I started as a volunteer, and then I became a captain,” he said.

Then, commissioners created a paid position as assistant chief, for which he applied and was granted in 2013. He was named acting chief in October 2014, interim chief in January 2015 and sworn-in as chief in April 2015, said district business manager Barbara Davis.

Firefighting is just one of Patterson’s careers. Before moving to the Desert Aire-Mattawa area, he was an electrician who was a volunteer firefighter, he said.

Of course, that changed as Patterson’s responsibilities grew. For instance, the chief in a department the size of GCFD 8 is not just the chief.

“You wear a lot of hats,” Patterson said. “You’re the training officer, the safety officer, you respond to as many calls as you can make. In a small department, you’re basically a working chief. You have a title, but you’re pretty much like everybody else.”

Patterson said there are several reasons people volunteer for the fire department. Many volunteers join because they have friends with the department and it sounds interesting. People also join as volunteers to get experience when they want to make firefighting a career, he said.

Others are looking for something to do — or at least they used to. Patterson said people are busier than they used to be and there isn’t as much interest in volunteering.

“Most departments are that way, that we could all use twice the volunteers that we have,” he said.

The reasons to volunteer, and the reasons to stay with it, vary from person to person, he said.

“Some of us are adrenaline junkies,” he said. “For others, they truly like the fact that they can make a difference.”

Fire District 8 personnel fight fires, but it’s also an emergency medical service, and there are more EMS than fire calls.

“That feeling, after a call, that you did good for somebody. That keeps bringing you back,” he said.

And people remember the help they got. KIds run up to him in the grocery store, excited to see him, remembering the time Patterson treated them in an emergency.

“We have kids that drive by and wave, every time they go by. Because you did something good for their family. It may not have been for them, but for their family,” he said.

But it can be a demanding job.

“It takes a different individual to do what we do. Generally, we’re dealing with the bad, and trying to make it better,” he said.

Unfortunately, it can’t always be made better, he said. State Route 243, for example, has been the scene of some pretty severe accidents.

“You drive through and you see the crosses (along the side of the road), and if you’ve been here long enough you know who they’re for, and what they’re for,” Patterson said.

There’s a spot on state Route 26, four crosses of different sizes, the site of an accident that killed an entire family.

“You’ve got daily reminders of those kinds of things going on. But you have to power through them,” he said.

But the firefighters seem to give each other more support in a department with a lot of volunteers, Patterson said.

“That’s one thing I find, being around paid departments in the past. A volunteer department does better dealing with one another and being there for one another,” he said. “Volunteers come back and talk about it, and they follow up and make sure everybody is doing okay. We’ve had some really tragic calls in the past, and we’ve actually had members who weren’t even on the (response) call the others and say, ‘How are you doing? Do you want to get together for a cup of coffee and go over it?’”

Patterson’s career as a firefighter goes back more than 40 years to his first experience in Gig Harbor.

“In 1974, I became a volunteer. I was going to college, needed a place to live, so myself and two others, we talked the chief into having a resident program,” he said.

It worked out for both parties, since Patterson and his friends got a place to live and the department got quick response when help was needed, he said.

He stayed active as a volunteer for about a decade, he said, then became less active as he needed to meet family obligations. He joined the fire department in the Puyallup-Graham area when he moved there, he said.

“They’re more of a paid department. Volunteers aren’t used as much,” he said. “I did, probably, another 10 years there.”

He moved to Mattawa in 2005, but he hesitated at first to join the department, he said.

“I kind of held off because then it was such a small department, and things were a little different here than I was used to,” he said. “There was a good group of people here, so that made joining easy.”

Davis said Patterson’s experience with different and bigger departments has benefited GCFD 8, especially with longer term planning. The goal was to make the district proactive rather than reactive, even though people weren’t used to it.

“The favorite saying was, ‘Well, we’ve never done it like that before,’” Patterson said.

But if the department wanted to move forward, changes needed to be made, he said. And while people understood that, it was still a challenge for everybody to get on board.

“Nobody had a problem with the changes, just that there were changes,” he said.

Patterson said the department has grown and added more paid personnel, and a new fire station is under construction. In fact, it’s almost finished. Fire district officials expect to start moving in sometime in early June.

While he is retiring, he’s not done with GCFD 8 yet. He’s working as a consultant until the new fire station is occupied.

“I don’t want to walk away until that’s done,” he said.