ACFD 5 hosts annual open house

OTHELLO — Adams County Fire District 5 hosted its annual Fire Prevention Week open house Oct. 12 at their station in Othello, alongside several other emergency services and agencies.

Fire Chief Gary Lebacken spoke about the event.

“It kind of concludes our week-long program in our elementary schools, and we finish it off with our open house,” Lebacken said. “We normally get about 500 people in attendance. We share it, though, with our fellow first responders.”

The open house’s attendance Oct. 12 was about what the event normally brings in, Lebacken said.

“We bring in Othello Police Department, Adams County Sheriff's Office, (Washington State Patrol) was here for a while. We bring in Othello EMS, we bring in Life Flight, we do the Adams County Fire Marshal and Emergency Management of Adams County,” Lebacken said. “We kind of tie it all together so the community can come in and talk to each and every agency that they may unfortunately need throughout the year.”

Lebacken elaborated on what they offered at the event.

“We just have a good evening. We normally run it from about five to eight o'clock and we give away a little bit of information and they're able to tour the station, our apparatus,” Lebacken said. “We run a junior firefighter challenge course, and then we also do hot dogs, popcorn and this year, we added the Simplot fry trailer.”

Lebacken said the junior firefighter challenge has children crawl through a tube to simulate a confined space, as well as other simulated firefighting activities.

The classroom visits leading up to the open house also tied into the education aspect of Fire Prevention Week.

“In the classrooms, we have a Pluggie, which is a robotic fire hydrant, and we go in and give a fire prevention program,” Lebacken said. “We teach them to obviously not play with matches, and (about) smoke detectors, home safety drills. We teach them stop, drop and roll, things like that.”

The event was also to show off the ACFD 5’s new fire engine, which Mayor Shawn Logan said during the Sep. 25 City Council meeting was an $850,000 investment by the city.

“We're in the process of tooling it and getting it into service,” Lebacken said. “It will replace an aging engine.”

Othello Community Hospital’s EMS Manager Jim Lomax explained EMS’s involvement in the event in providing information to the public.

“We just kind of talked to people, we had a table there,” Lomax said. “We gave out cookies and some bracelets and pens and pencils, things from the hospital. And it went great. We had lots of enthusiastic people asking us good questions. We gave out 400 cookies.”

Lomax said the turnout and engagement from the public was very good and has been good for the previous couple of years after COVID significantly decreased that engagement.

“It's just to have everyone there and have the community get to meet and become familiar with the different emergency services so that when they do have an emergency, they're comfortable with us,” Lomax said. “We like to talk to the kids, because then if they ever do need an ambulance, when the ambulance comes to their house they're not as scared about it. They're more comfortable.”

The primary motivation of the event overall was education and engagement with the public, Lebacken said.

“They engage. They always have questions,” Lebacken said. “We show them our gear. We actually let the kids try our gear on. So, you know, it's a lot more educational and (about) where your tax monies are going as well.”

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.