Zephyr Fire Crew gets a permanent home

The Zephyr Fire Crew no longer has to call the old landfill on Upper Kingsbury Grade's Logging Road Lane as their home. The Tahoe Douglas Fire Department's wildland fire/fuels reduction team was officially welcomed into new digs with an open house this week. The Tahoe Chamber was on hand for the ribbon cutting ceremony, but it wasn't any normal ribbon. Zephyr Fire crew members cut through a wooden ribbon with a chainsaw.

Officially named Station #22, the building at the bottom of Kingsbury Grade now has room for meetings, desks, lockers, and supply storage, something they've never had before. The firefighters previously stored their gear at their own homes.

"It's been a long, hard journey," said Tahoe Douglas Fire Chief Ben Sharit during the ribbon cutting ceremony. "We've had staff who started this project who have now retired."

In 1980, Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District merged with Kingsbury Fire Protection to create the Tahoe Douglas Fire Department, and a home for what is now known as the Zephyr Fire Crew has been in the making ever since.

The former phone company office on Kingsbury was converted into exactly what Zephyr Fire needed, truck bays to fix and maintain equipment, space to store backpacks full of equipment, a place to store all of the chainsaw oil they go through, and office space. They now even have a workout room.

Tahoe Douglas Fire has been in escrow on the property for two years, but the former owners allowed the firemen to move in and lease the space until the long, drawn out process was completed. What further complicated things was the fact that the one parcel with two properties on it had to be split into two since the one building holding the phone company's switching station is staying with Frontier Communications.

The Zephyr Fire Crew was established in 2008 and is partially funded by the Fire Safe Community Fund. The Zephyr crew is a Type 2 Initial Attack hand crew that is trained to respond to a variety of incidents, but primarily wildland fires. Currently the crew is staffed with 30 personnel and employs a full time Superintendent and one full time Crew Foreman.

Besides being a trained hand crew, Zephyr Fire also does wood chipping and defensible space in the Douglas County portion of Lake Tahoe.