Leis named fire warden

Firefighting has been a lifelong passion for Crook County’s new Fire Warden, Doug Leis.

“My dad was a volunteer firefighter when I was a kid growing up, I hung out there with those guys back home in Wisconsin and became a firefighter there before I moved out here,” he says.

“The first ten years, I was in Gillette and I wasn’t on the fire department, but when I moved to Moorcroft, I got to know the guys over there and I’d been there probably about a year when I found out when one of their meetings was and went down and said hey, can I be a fireman too?”

That was 30 years ago, Leis says. When he saw the recent advertisement in the paper for a fire warden, he already knew the county commissioners were looking for someone able to bring the county fire department back up to speed and make improvements to how things were working.

“The reason I put in for it was to try to get the department moving forward,” he says.

As well as plenty of paperwork to get caught up on, Leis aims to start by cleaning up the fire cache, meeting all the zone wardens and inventorying all current equipment, followed by grant writing and creating a new wildfire protection plan for the county with agencies such as State Forestry. First, though, he plans to get through this year’s fire season.

“This time of year, I’m not trying to get into a lot of the grant writing and stuff. I want to get going on it later on, but we’re right in the middle of our fire season right now,” he says.

Leis hopes he can make a difference for the county and the volunteers he will be working with, and for whom he has deep respect.

“I’ve been a volunteer in a fire service for the better part of my adult life, so I know what it is. There is nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer – James Doolittle made that statement when they did the raid on Japan,” he says.

“I believe in that statement, it’s a fact. In this state, you look at fire and EMS and it’s probably well over 60 percent volunteerism.”