Fire chief updates council on regional wildfires; city receives $1 million for station renovations

Stanton Fire Chief provided the City Council with an update on regional wildfire activity, mutual-aid deployments and the department’s August incident statistics, and reported the city had received $1 million in congressional funding for station renovations.

Chief Brian Barrett described the department’s response to a large wildfire that began the previous day and noted significant interagency cooperation across county lines, saying the incident had “a long fun week or 2” ahead and required shared regional resources. He said the department stood up a type 3 incident management team and reconfigured some apparatus to maintain local service levels while supporting the regional response.

Barrett gave a monthly operational summary for August: “Over August, we had 372 total incidents. We had 9 fires, 347 EMS calls, 16 for hazardous condition calls for service,” he said. He also described recent community events that involved fire personnel, including National Night Out and an employee luncheon.

During announcements, the council was notified that the city received a $1,000,000 check from Congressman Luke Correa’s office to fund station renovations. “This week, we received the million dollar check from congressman Luke Correa's office on behalf of the city, so for station renovations,” Barrett told the council. City and department staff said they had conducted a preliminary walkthrough and will coordinate next steps on improvements.

Councilmembers asked to be kept informed about renovation planning; staff said they would stay in contact as project details are developed. No procurement or construction contract was approved at the meeting.

The chief also described aerial firefighting resources and noted in-county aircraft had larger water capacities than older helicopters, and that regional large air tankers and helitankers were supporting the incident response.