Well done, West Lakes firefighters

One of the things that really impressed us about the West Lakes Fire Department’s achievement in improving its Insurance Services Office rating is this:

Fighting fires is a job that has gotten harder, not easier, in Mat-Su and in West Lakes in particular.

New buildings have popped up, and with them, new hazards. There’s a natural gas fueling station in the service area now that wasn’t there before.

In fact, so many more big buildings have arrived on the scene that the Insurance Services Office told West Lakes that it needed to add a couple of trucks that can put firefighters up high — a ladder truck or an aerial platform truck — to fight potential fires from above.

The Valley is growing as it has been for years and a lot of that growth has been in the West Lakes/Big Lake area. It’s growing so much that fire departments like Central Mat-Su and West Lakes are taking on more full-time staff than ever. We see this as a transition from paid-on-call responders to some kind of a paid-on-call/professional firefighters hybrid and we see the Valley’s future as one with fully professional firefighters.

It would be easy for a fire department, faced with that kind of growth, to let something like their Insurance Services rating slip. Maybe you can focus on it when you’re done putting out the fires.

But for West Lakes and the Valley’s other fire departments, keeping up with growth and continuously improving their fire service rating are priorities.

West Lakes Fire Chief Bill Gamble offered an interesting statistic in today’s story about the change in his department’s rating. He said that his own personal homeowners insurance dropped from $1,900 a year to $1,000 when the department traded its 8b rating for a 5 in 2011.

Fire service area taxes in West Lakes are 1.78 mills. Said another way, Chief Gamble is saving more annually on his fire insurance than he pays into borough coffers for fire protection. And that’s kind of amazing.

The department has a gleaming fleet of big, impressive trucks. It has dozens of firefighters, each with their own turnout gear. This is an operation that takes a lot of money to run. And yet it’s still cheaper to invest in a local fire service to protect all of the assets in the fire service area than to pay for one home owner’s fire insurance bill.

It’s almost an added bonus, then, that there’s a much better chance that when the flames do come and you need to call for help, that firefighters will be able to douse the flames before you lose everything.

So we applaud West Lakes and urge the department to keep up the good work.

But the department doesn’t seem to need that encouragement. Toward the end of Monday’s interview Chief Gamble noted that West Lakes didn’t just earn a 4 it got halfway to a 3. Gamble said he sees that as a worthy goal for the decade or so he has left before his retirement.

“Being the overachiever that I am my sights are at a three. How do I get a three?” he said.