Flathead Valley Emergency Services Spread Thin Amid Busy Summer

During the frenetic summer months in the Flathead Valley, emergency calls rise to a fever pitch as numerous incidents unfold in rapid succession and first responders from multiple agencies spring into action en masse.

That scenario was never more evident this summer than last week, as emergency personnel from throughout the region found themselves harried by multiple incidents requiring heavy manpower, including structure fires, helicopter and plane crashes, automobile and logging truck accidents, and even a woman injured by a horse in Glacier National Park.

Law enforcement and emergency medical services have contingency plans for parsing out their resources, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a tipping point.

“We get stretched thin, and this week has been worse than most. I didn’t get much sleep,” Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry said. “People get overworked, and unfortunately in our business, unlike other businesses that have seasonal bumps in their workload, I can’t just call up Express Employment Services and ask them to send 10 more cops.”

Curry said so far this year, Flathead County has received 23,311 emergency calls for service, more than last year. The call volume increases 60 percent in the summer versus winter months.

“Certainly we are busier this year than we were last year, and we were busier last year than the year before, and so on and so forth,” Curry said. “As our population grows, so too does the volume of our calls for service.”

The figures don’t include emergency calls that occur within incorporated cities, like Whitefish, Columbia Falls and Kalispell

But those agencies are feeling the pressure, too.

When a fire engulfed a home near Columbia Falls on Aug. 3, killing a 30-year-old woman and her 3-year-old son, agencies from Whitefish, Bad Rock, Columbia Falls, West Valley and Evergreen responded, leaving a dearth of resources to handle other calls.

The Whitefish Fire Department’s resources were spread so thin it couldn’t respond to other calls.

“We have been busy this summer, just busy in general. And we only have so many resources,” Whitefish Fire Chief Joe Page said. “During the fire in Columbia Falls, we couldn’t handle a call where a woman was injured by a horse in Glacier National Park, so what ended up happening is they sent an ambulance all the way from Big Mountain. And that is a long way to be sending an ambulance, but everyone was tied up. We just don’t have enough resources.”

In Whitefish, officers have had their hands full patrolling a crowded resort town whose summer months see an influx of visitors. Although most late-night calls involve alcohol-related incidents, they also responded to a stabbing in June, and have not arrested a suspect.

“The whole city has just been crazy this summer with activity. There are so many people here,” Whitefish Police Chief Bill Dial said. “A stabbing is not the kind of thing we normally see in Whitefish.

Chief Page worried that if the demand for emergency responders continues to increase without a corresponding increase in responders, the agencies are in trouble.

“We have smoke and mirrors, but we are skating by on the skin of our teeth,” Page said. “One of these days we are not going to get by.”