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Rural peninsula fire depts. get $80k in grants

Cooper Landing Emergency Services volunteer Danette Snyder works on a fire last May in Cooper Landing.
Courtesy of Rachel Sullivan
Cooper Landing Emergency Services volunteer Danette Snyder works on a fire last May in Cooper Landing.

Nine rural fire departments on the Kenai Peninsula are getting more than $80,000 in grants to boost firefighting efforts. The award money was announced by the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection and comes from the federal Department of Agriculture.

In all, the Volunteer Fire Capacity program is sending $306,292 to 36 rural fire departments across Alaska. Among those are the Moose Pass Volunteer Fire Company, the Lowell Point Volunteer Fire Department, Cooper Landing Emergency Services, the Bear Creek Volunteer Fire Department, the Seward Fire Department, the Nikiski Fire Department, and the Homer Volunteer Fire Department.

To be eligible for the program, departments must be registered with the state, serve less than 10,000 people and put up a 10% grant match. This year, awards were capped at $10,000, up from $7,000 in 2024 and from $6,000 in 2023.

Bryan Ledahl is the deputy chief at the Nikiski Fire Department. He says the department will use $9,900 to replace its portable water tanks. Those tanks let firefighters take more water to rural areas.

“We can deploy them anywhere along the road system where there’s no hydrants,” he said. “So we can basically fill those with our water tankers – useful for wildland fire- and structural fire-fighting as well.”

Ledahl says the portable tanks are especially useful in places with few fire hydrants – like Nikiski. If state forestry crews join a firefighting effort, Ledahl says they can tap into Nikiski’s water supply.

“As long as we keep those tanks full, they can deploy their portable pumps into those tanks and supply our water to pretty remote areas,” he said.

Ledahl says the department has received grants through the program before, spending the money on things like personal protective equipment and emergency fire shelters.

On the eastern Kenai Peninsula, Lowell Point’s volunteer fire department is getting $10,000 to replace gear for firefighters. Fire Chief Karl Van Buskirk says the grant is enough to outfit at least two of their three volunteer firefighters with a complete set of “bunker gear.” That’s the standard protective equipment worn during structure fire response.

“Boots, turnout pants, turnout coat, gloves, hoods, helmets and eye protection,” he described.

Van Buskirk says their department operates on an annual budget of about $20,000 worth of private donations. And even though Seward boasts a temperate rainforest environment, he says the fire risk is higher than you might think.

“In the summer when it gets really dry, the duff – the moss down in the trees – is just powder dry,” he said. “It’s three feet thick, it’s power dry and it’s just absolute flash tinder – it’ll ignite. And we, with the campers, and with camper people camping and campfires, we get fires that go into the ground and we find ourselves responding to fires that have traveled 50 to 100 feet underground.”

Van Buskirk says their department didn’t respond to any fire calls on Lowell Point in 2024. But they respond to a lot of medical calls, and also team up with the fire departments in Seward and Bear Creek to lend assistance when needed.

Prior to joining KDLL's news team in May 2024, O'Hara spent nearly four years reporting for the Peninsula Clarion in Kenai. Before that, she was a freelance reporter for The New York Times, a statehouse reporter for the Columbia Missourian and a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. You can reach her at aohara@kdll.org