As Rollins Fire Department Strives to Keep Pace with Growth, Lakeshore Community Answers Call for Assistance

When Carey Cooley joined the Rollins Volunteer Fire Department as a teenage cadet, she didn’t think twice about how to answer the timeworn childhood question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Thirty-two years later, Cooley now serves as chief of the all-volunteer fire department along Flathead Lake’s west shore, a position she assumed in November 2023 when her father, Terry Gore, retired after more than four decades, including 19 years as the department’s chief. Cooley’s mother, Linda Gore, first became Rollins Volunteer Fire Department’s (RVFD) secretary-treasurer in 1994. In total, Linda has served 21 years in that role and continues as secretary today.

And with Addy Cooley, 18, now “running and gunning with us” while attending Flathead Valley Community College, Carey Cooley admits that “firefighting is pretty much in our family’s DNA.”

“For three generations, our family has been on most calls and at most trainings,” Cooley said on April 24. “I have three daughters and when Addy turned 16, she joined as a cadet and at 18 she became a full member. Now she’s looking at fire as a career.”

But as Cooley’s family grows its dedication to the community fire hall, and as the local populations of unincorporated lakeshore communities fill out from Polson to Somers, the fire hall hasn’t grown an inch. Neither has the ranks of its volunteer force of about 20 unpaid firefighters, some of whom are aging past their prime.

Meanwhile, the frequency and intensity of wildland fire continues on a sharp upward trajectory, a reality that’s come into dire focus in recent years as a series of destructive blazes ignited in the Rollins area, including the Niarada and Elmo fires. The confluence of social and environmental factors illustrates the urgent need of volunteer fire departments like Rollins’ to keep pace with the region’s surging demand for service.

Chief Cooley said the number of calls for service along the west shore of Flathead Lake has nearly doubled in recent years, for structure and wildland fires as well as for additional ambulance assistance for the Lakeside Quick Response Unit. Because it takes about 50 minutes to get an ambulance from Polson, Rollins is often the first on the scene of an emergency, Cooley said, explaining that her “real-world job” as Lake County’s fire mitigation coordinator complements her volunteer position as chief of the RVFD.

“One job just bleeds right into the other,” said Cooley, whose resume also includes stints teaching at Stillwater Christian School and working for the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. “As a fire chief I really have a very good understanding of what the county needs, what the fire district needs and what’s happening with the community.When the Elmo and Niarada fires were happening we were pulling resources from all the departments in the county. It’s imperative that we know how to work with each other to do our best out there in the communities we serve.”

But gaining that comprehensive understanding requires extensive time, training and resources, which isn’t easy when every member of the firefighting force, from chief to cadet, is juggling other jobs and responsibilities.

“Everyone has a job and a family and yet they find the time to get together for trainings because they are community-minded folks,” Cooley said. “It’s pretty great when you get that many people together with that mindset.”

Although Cooley assigns all the accolades to her force of volunteer firefighters, her family and friends in the community liken her to a superhero whose alter-ego matches her natural-born pedigree. And as the growing pains continue at RVFD and another fire season approaches, they say it’s the community’s turn to answer the call for assistance.

Greg LeFevre owned a vacation home in Rollins for nearly 30 years before moving here full-time in 2020. With more time on his hands, he “wanted to figure out how to give back to the community.”

“I was at a picnic and someone asked if I’d ever considered joining the volunteer fire department,” LeFevre said, recalling his introduction to RVFD, where he now volunteers as a firefighter. “I was aware of the fire department, but until I went through training and saw how much they were doing with very little support I had no idea about the scale.”

As LeFevre grew more familiar with RVFD’s operations, he began to inventory its greatest needs — space to store and maintain equipment and access to a central water source. Because RVFD’s fire district doesn’t have fire hydrants, its firefighters must truck water to the fire.

“Currently, we have one water tender and while fighting an active fire, its supply can be depleted in minutes,” Cooley said. To improve its capabilities, the RVFD plans to add at least one additional water tender to its department, but its current facility lacks the space to accommodate it.

Currently, Cooley and other members store equipment at their homes because there isn’t enough room at the fire hall’s garage bays. And while the existing facility is equipped with a 10,000-gallon cistern, the tank doesn’t have a pump, quadrupling the amount of time required to draft the water into a fire truck.

“The facility was built almost 30 years ago and the community of Rollins has grown tremendously in that time,” LeFevre said. “The amount of calls has increased dramatically over last several years, but unlike a large city, we don’t have fire hydrants. We don’t really have water. We’re on Flathead Lake but our access points are extremely limited. We have West Shore State Park on the north end and Dayton on the south end, but our department is centrally located in the district. We had a structure fire last year and we went through that water really fast.”

While Lake County collects taxes through a mill levy for the fire district, the roughly $80,000 it generates annually only covers basic expenses and the cost of utilities for the building, LeFevre said. Over the course of about a year, LeFevre met with an architectural firm to create preliminary designs for RVFD’s expansion, composed a budget and put together a building committee to oversee the two-phase project, with both phases costing an estimated $2 million.

The first phase involves constructing an 8,400-square-foot building connected to the current facility, both to accommodate current and future emergency vehicles. It would also provide dedicated areas for vehicle maintenance, equipment storage, lockers, dressing rooms, and gear cleaning. The expansion includes a paved Medevac helicopter landing zone and increased water-storage capacity. The estimated cost of the first phase is $1.4 million with a projected construction timeline of between eight and 10 months.

The project’s second phase would cost about $600,000 and focuses on repurposing the existing fire hall and improving the department’s training facility.

Last fall, just as LeFevre began mounting a grassroots fundraising campaign, a new family arrived in the area and took an interest in their neighborhood fire department.

Originally from Lethbridge, Alberta, Mark and Robyn Jones now reside in Texas, where they’ve earned a fortune building their company, Goosehead Insurance, into an industry leader. Their wealth has allowed them to lay deeper roots in the Flathead Valley, including the acquisition in 2021 of 126,000 acres of forested timberland between Montana Highway 28 at Niarada and U.S. 2 in Kila, as well as property near Rollins, where the Joneses built a home.

Called Flathead Ridge Ranch, the family has no plans to develop the land other than for personal use, and continues to allow public access across much of its property, which spans rich elk and deer habitat.

“When we started thinking about what infrastructure we were going to build on a property that’s heavily forested, we reached out to the Rollins Fire Department and met Chief Cooley,” said Ryan Langston, Mark and Robyn Jones’ son in law, who works as president of Flathead Ridge Ranch (FRR), as well as general counsel of Goosehead Insurance. “She was just so helpful, and as we learned more about their fundraising needs and expansion plans, we decided this would be good for us and good for the community.”

The family donated $250,000 to RVFD and pledged matching funds up to $300,000.

“We feel that we are part of the community now, and wildfire is one of the biggest threats to any community in northwest Montana,” Langston said. “We’re not a developer who’s going to put in major neighborhoods, we’ve just built a single-family home. But the communities are growing and the landscape is changing, so a true fire department with good equipment and a fast response time is going to be critical. Otherwise, I think that fire department is going to be stretched beyond its means.”

On May 3, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., Flathead Ridge Ranch will host a pancake breakfast at the Rollins Volunteer Fire Department, with the ranch’s head of forestry, Caleb Deitz, cooking up sausage and flipping pancakes while fielding questions about its forest management plan, and how it dovetails with RVFD’s mission to protect the community.

“Our biggest existential risk living on a giant patch of forest is wildfire,” Deitz said. “If it burns up, that’s it. So all of the work I do has a component of wildfire mitigation and planning to it. As we got started with our infrastructure projects, I reached out to Rollins Fire because they would be the first on scene in the event of an emergency. We’ve had a small fire on the lake, and by the time I rolled out of bed their entire crew was already on top of it. When we learned of the extent of their needs, it seemed like an obvious opportunity for Flathead Ridge Ranch to give back.”

For Cooley, who knows every chief of every volunteer fire department from Chief Cliff to Charlo and beyond, the fact that Flathead Ridge Ranch “took an interest in our little department” is nothing short of a miracle.

“Thank goodness they did,” she said. “They put on a pancake feed for us last year and it was a great way to pull the community in. Now they’re continuing with matching funds for new buildings. This could meet our needs and be a vision for the next 20 to 30 years.”

Time will tell whether future generations of Cooleys continue the family’s legacy of volunteer service. But assuming RVFD clears its fundraising goals — LeFevre said the department was still $200,000 shy of its phase-one goal — they should have plenty of space to put everyone.

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