ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Statistics showed as of 2020, 5 percent of career firefighters and 14 percent of volunteer firefighters were women.
Seward County Fire Chief Andrew Barkley said his daytime staff includes a total of seven firefighters, including he and Deputy Chief John Steckel, and that staff includes two female firefighters.
Liberal native Morgan West came to the department about a year ago, and after an initial stint as a reserve in May 2024, she moved to full time in November 2024.
West has an associate’s degree in accounting, which she admitted not using, but she did say it was nice to have. She said she decided to go full time as she saw firefighting as a way to serve her community and support and serve the people around her.
“It ended up being something I’m super passionate about,” she said.
Joann Rivera, now a lieutenant with the Seward County Fire District, was born in El Paso, Texas, and at the age of 6, she and her family moved to Liberal, where she has been since then.
Rivera began working with the SCFD about three and a half years ago, and she went straight to being a career firefighter.
“They kind of threw me into it, but they taught me along the way,” she said. “It’s a pretty full job.”
For both West and Rivera, there is no such thing as an average day at the fire department.
“Every day is something different,” West said. “A lot of it is either working on trucks or stations, making sure everything is ready to go. Our main priority is making sure the trucks are ready to go because we could get anything at anytime.”
“On a daily basis, we make sure our trucks run, especially the main trucks, and we make sure our gear’s ready,” Rivera said. “We do chores. We do some sort of training every day to make sure we keep on that. That’s pretty much it unless we get a call. Then we just throw everything out the window and run.”
With about a year on the job, West said she already loves what she does with the department.
“It’s definitely nice to get to do everything,” she said. “With bigger departments, you get to work for five minutes, and you’re done. Here, we get to do everything. We get to be there from start to finish and see it all through. We have a great department, a great team. We trust everyone with everything. It’s enjoyable. It’s nice that you always get to do something fun if it’s working on trucks or cleaning stations. It’s always something different.”
Rivera said with smaller departments such as the SCFD, firefighters get to learn and do more than bigger departments.
“There’s always something new happening,” she said. “There are calls I’ve been to now even though I’m three years in that I’ve never experienced. It’s something new every day.”
Something new for the team at the SCFD, the department’s page on the county’s Web site, www.sewardcountyks.org, has been updated with better access to information.
West and Rivera have played a big role, but Rivera said the undertaking has been a team project after Barkley expressed interest in having a more user friendly site.
“We ended up all coordinating and talking about it,” Rivera said. “We made a big board of stuff we wanted on there. Every day for about two weeks to a month, everyone would go on and add a little stuff, what they thought we needed. That last week or so, it was perfecting it, making sure everything right. For anything else, we threw everything together. Morgan’s really been doing stuff on Facebook and Instagram. Every once in a while, I’ll get bored and post something.”
For both West and Rivera, firefighting is their choice of career.
“This is definitely my career,” West said. “This is where I want to retire and spend my working years. It’s a good way to serve your community and be involved. Especially with the Web site, that’s given us such a good opportunity to be more open with everyone in the county. This is the number of calls we do. That gets updated every month, and people can go in and look at it. It’s a really good way to be involved with your community.”
“This is definitely a forever type thing,” Rivera said. “There’s just something about working here. It’s nice to work in a small department, and it’s nice to work here in Seward County. You get to know people. You go out, and they’re like, ‘Hey you’re from the fire department.’ It’s nice.”
Southwest Kansas is no stranger to the wind, and in March, Seward County saw its share of heavy breezes. Having lived in the county for quite some time, Rivera and West are used to heavy winds, and Rivera said she also saw a few gusts in Southwest Texas.
“El Paso does get windy sometimes,” she said. “Only one side has mountains on it. The other side is prone to anything. I’ve been here since I was 6, so I’m used to it.”
As for preparing for gusty conditions, Rivera said the SCFD team tries to over-prepare for the day’s breezes.
“It’s better to be super prepared than not even prepared,” she said. We do staffing in Kismet every day now, and for windy days, we mentally prepare for it. With one of the fires we had recently, it was 70 something mile wind gusts. For that, we just have to listen to the radio.”
Rivera said Barkley and Steckel communicate on the radio as to the best point to fight a fire and a plan of attack.
“We have eyes everywhere,” Rivera said. “It’s not scary at all going out there because we have them out there.”
Barkley said his team did pretty well with the recent gusty days.
We didn’t really have anything major,” he said. “We did have one fire on Arkalon Park Road the day that big dust storm came in. The city was out looking for stuff over by the golf course. We did have that fire, but we got there quick enough that we were able to keep it at roughly six acres and kept it on the guy’s property.”
Barkley said having West and Rivera on his team is nothing short of amazing.
“In this job, you can find a person who has no passion or desire for it,” he said. “You can teach them all the tactics in the world, and they’re never going to go anywhere. These two have the passion and desire to do this job. Teaching them the tactics, they keep moving forward with everything they do.”
In addition to five daytime firefighters and two chiefs, the SCFD has four paid call firefighters to support operations with tankers, and Barkley said this has the department in good shape to handle fires in the county.
“One of the things we’ve adjusted going into April is our staffing in Kismet,” he said. “We’ve offset our staffing so we have at least one person in Kismet seven days a week.”
Barkley said the fire forecast for the rest of 2025 for Seward County is quite similar to that of the beginning of the year.
“We’re on that line,” he said. “Are we going to be on the north side or the south side? We had some pretty windy days in March, but with the fires we did have, the guys got there fast enough to where we’ve kept everything to where we’ve been.”
Barkley’s goal with every fire is to have 10 acres or less of damage, and for this year, he said fires have been kept to about six to seven acres of damage, which he contributed to having staff in stations during the day, being able to get out the door within a minute and get to a scene faster.
“When you look at a volunteer department, their volunteers have to come from work or wherever they’re at to the station, get a truck and drive to the fire,” he said. “That can take 15 to 20 minutes, where we’re doing it in less time.”
