ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
2025 saw many changes in Liberal, including with the Liberal Fire Department,
As Liberal Fire Chief Kelly Kirk tells it, 2025 was a very successful year for the department.
“2025 was an overall pretty amazing year, and there was a lot of change. Back in the first of the year, our deputy chief Skeety Poulton retired, and he’d been with the department 32 years, so we took that opportunity to make some changes in the department,” Kirk said. “I’ve been the fire chief since 2008, and we’ve always operated with a chief officer, and then we had a deputy chief and a fire marshal who were basically equal in the organizational structure. The deputy chief handled the operations and emergency response side while the fire marshal handled code enforcement, fire prevention inspections and fire prevention education, so they each had their own hemisphere of the department. When he retired, we took the opportunity to change the structure a little bit, so now we operate with a chief, a deputy chief, and three battalion chief positions. Each of those battalion chiefs has a different area of responsibility – for example, one handles all of our training and recertification within the department, another one handles all of our public education like the school visits in the spring and anything else we do with regard to fire prevention or education, and then the other is still more of an operational guy who handles our records management system and the day-to-day operations of the shift firefighters and things like that. It’s been a big change and experienced some growing pains, but overall, I think it’s exceeded my expectations of what I’d hoped for. It’s something I started thinking about when I attended a chiefs’ seminar and talked to some other fire chief and see what models they use for their department. We finally put it into place this year and it’s working out really well.”
Responses also remained steady, Kirk said.
“It’s been a typical year as far as emergency response, our call numbers aren’t any higher, or any lower than what we would normally expect to have. Of course, we also run out with the ambulance on medical and rescue calls within the city, and that’s the bulk of our response,” Kirk said. “Through the end of October, we ran about 224 fire-related calls and 1,212 rescue calls, and that’s pretty typical across the country too. Fire departments that run medical with the ambulance service tend to run about 70 to 80 percent medical calls and the rest are fire and hazardous condition calls. Odd as it sounds, I always say the less we do, the better it is for the community because we’d rather do things on the prevention side than the response side. Overall, with all the changes we’ve had and the responses we’ve had, staffing levels have been fairly constant and we’ve been staffed up. Some years, we’ll go where we have some turnover, we’ll go without some positions for a while, and it puts a stress on the other guys working the shift. But overall, I think it’s been a great year.”
There has also been work done in terms of equipment repairs and replacement, Kirk said.
“For the most part, with the big-ticket items we’ve been able to stay on good replacement programs with them. A lot of the big-ticket items, like our SCBA (our air packs breathing air that we use to go into fires), replacing the full complement of those is around $300,000, so in order to keep the budget level and know what to expect and avoid spikes in the budget, we do those now on a seven-year lease purchase plan, so we have a steady payment through the seven years,” Kirk said. “And at the end of seven years, the entire equipment gets updated to the most current technology, and we just keep paying that level payment. As far as apparatus replacement, we didn’t replace any trucks this year, that all that got taken care of last year – we have the new tower truck that replaced the 1995 ladder truck we had before, which was on its last legs service life. We also got the fire engine and the structural pumper. So now that we have three of those – one for station one, one for station two and one for station three. We plan for those items and we budget for those things every year, and get the support of the Liberal City Commission and city manager. We try to be reasonable about our replacement requests, so it all tends to run pretty smoothly. Since we do a good job of planning and budgeting, those things kind of take care of themselves.”
Another exciting thing for the LFD is the recent news of the LFD buying out the county’s share of the 15th Street fire station.
“Back in 1982, the county and the city went together on a joint fire station, and we were in that until 2006, when the city sold the station to Walgreens, and we separated for about a year until we got this station completed,” Kirk said. “Then, the county came back and the city provided them the space they had prior and then any additional space, which they paid for. In 2025, through work between the city and the county, the county fire guys relocated over to their 18th Street location. The city bought out the county’s share and equity in the station so they could add on the necessary base to house their apparatus at the other station. We were pretty cramped when we moved into the station, it was relatively full for the most part, but with the addition of the battalion chiefs and needing the office space and the training room space, probably going to be the biggest thing for us is being able to host training classes and things like that at the station. We always did pretty well co-existing the two departments. There were times when we fought like brothers, but for the most part, we worked very well with each other, especially with regard to emergency response and assisting each other when we call for help. It has been a long process, and it doesn’t really change our day-to-day operations and it doesn’t really change theirs, it just clears up and gives a clear separation so each department can do what’s best for them.”
The new arrangement will have many benefits in terms of trainings and other similar programs, Kirk said.
“We have the training space, and we have the training officer in place to take care of the training, so it should streamline our process. A lot of the certifications our firefighters have, there are some required certifications that get them to be certified in basic firemanship, being able to drive the trucks, pump the trucks, to be Kansas certified EMTs,” Kirk said. “They’re also hazmat technicians, and then there are the technical rescue disciplines like confined space rescue, trench rescue and high angle rope rescue and low angle rope rescue. Once they’re certified in the basics, there are some recertification hours that go along with that, so it helps us track and make sure we’re providing ample opportunity for everybody to get their necessary recertification hours, and then for those who are fully certified with all the required certifications, it provides us the opportunity to provide them with different training opportunities that will lead them into more specialized areas, like fire investigator, fire inspector. We train a lot of them to be fire instructors, to be able to teach fire service type classes. We have in-house instructors now, so we can take those courses from the University of Kansas or the National Fire Academy, and we can teach them locally with our own instructors, and that allows us not only to train our own department, but we can invite departments from around Southwest Kansas to come and attend those trainings as well, which enables us to get to know the other departments, and it also provides a familiarity with them and we learn what resources we all have and how we can share.”
All of that collaboration, Kirk said, will be beneficial to all.
“A couple of years ago we entered into an agreement with Garden City, Dodge City and Ford County for the Southwest Kansas Rescue Task Force, and that has provided our personnel with some free training opportunities they would have never been able to get just locally without traveling and paying quite a bit of money to do,” Kirk said. “Some examples of that are structural collapse classes that gives them access to learn and train with different technology, like concrete saws, concrete boring saw drills, different types of lifting equipment, cameras and listening devices for people who might be trapped in structures, which is very specialized training. There’s also swift water rescue – we don’t have a lot of standing water around here, but after thunderstorms, there are places in town where we do have fast water, and there are dangers associated with that, so we have people trained in dive rescue and boat rescue and things like that. It’s very specialized stuff we’ve never in the history of the fire department – or at least, since I’ve been here, had access to.”
Staffing will also continue being worked, Kirk said.
“Right now, we basically keep three firefighters at station one because of the equipment that’s located there, then two at station two on Pine Street, and only one at the airport,” Kirk said. “It goes against all of our training and all of our operational guidelines to have an individual by themselves at a station truck, so the person at the airport is responsible for flight standbys, which are mandated by the FAA. But they have to come back into the city for medical calls or structure fire calls, so getting that seventh person on shift will let us to pair guys up instead of having somebody by themselves out there. That’s going to increase our functionality quite a bit. Plus, we always keep an eye towards our ISO rating. For ISO, when we do have a house fire or commercial fire in town, there’s a certain number of people that we need to get on scene with us within a certain number of minutes. And right now, we rely when we’re on full staff, we have six people, we actually need somewhere between 14 and 17 to fight a house fire, so we rely on the dedication and loyalty of our off-duty and volunteer personnel to come back to the scene and help us fight those fires. With the seven per shift and the five administrative positions that’s going to allow us to at least put closer to 10 people on scene right away and not rely on the off-duty and the volunteer response back because one of the changes I’ve seen in my career is it’s hard to get volunteers who are able to respond at all hours of the day. That just can’t exist with the jobs they have to have otherwise. We have some great volunteers in our department, some very long-term and very dedicated people, but it’s difficult to find and keep those people.”
Overall, Kirk said, he and the department are looking forward to a successful 2026.
“I’d just like to let the people know the department’s here to serve and support them. If they ever have questions with regard to public safety, fire safety, they’re welcome to come by the station for tours,” Kirk said. “We’re always here, and we’re, by our very nature, here to serve, so we appreciate the support we get and looking forward to another year of progress.”
