REGION
Wallowa.com
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
A9
New faces, old problems in frontier emergency response
By TIM TRAINOR
For the East Oregonian
If your car drives off the
road, your house catches
fire, or your ex is pounding
too loudly on your door in
Wheeler County, know this:
It’s likely to be a long time
before help arrives.
Currently, a four-person
sheriff’s office patrols the
rural county in north-central
Oregon. Yet a system of vol-
unteer firefighters and EMTs,
in place for more than a gen-
eration in the county, is in
danger of collapse.
The number of volunteer
firefighters has dropped by
more than half since the lum-
ber mill in Fossil closed more
than 20 years ago, taking with
it most of the local economy
and much of the population.
The regional emergency dis-
patch center in nearby Con-
don is down three positions.
To cover, dispatchers have
been working 12-hour shifts
for nearly a year. There are
no city police departments
in Wheeler County and no
Oregon State Police troopers
are based there, though some
can respond from neighbor-
ing jurisdictions many miles
away.
Despite that, public safety
could have been worse fol-
lowing a changeover of its
entire county sheriff’s office
in 2018. When former sheriff
Chris Humphreys announced
in June that he wanted to
resign his position, each of
his deputies decided to move
on as well.
“It’s just kind of like when
a band breaks up,” Hum-
phreys said. “When one per-
son leaves, no one else wants
to be here. And by here I
mean in law enforcement ...
no one wants to be here with-
out each other.”
Humphreys stayed on
until December as a new
band began to form. That
crew is now led by Sher-
iff Mike Smith, who was
approved by the county court
after his most recent stint as
deputy in neighboring Gil-
liam County. Undersher-
EO Media Group/Tim Trainor/East Oregonian
The Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office evidence cage, located in the courthouse basement, must
occasionally be emptied so defendants have a place to sit during trial breaks.
iff Mitch Elliot, who joined
the force earlier in the year,
has experience at both public
and private law enforcement
agencies throughout Ore-
gon. Two recently hired dep-
uties are attending the acad-
emy and will not be able to
work on their own until later
this summer.
Lack of resources
Though a four-person
department is back in oper-
ation, structural problems
remain in Wheeler County.
It is Oregon’s poorest, least
populated and fastest shrink-
ing county. Its 1,100 peo-
ple are spread across 1,700
square miles. Sage, juniper
and rattlesnakes populate the
rest — a mostly unsettled
desert that includes the John
Day Fossil Beds National
Monument as well as parts
of the Ochoco and Umatilla
national forests. More than
half of Wheeler County is
federally owned, so no taxes
are levied on those tracts to
help fill local coffers.
The sheriff’s office is
tasked with enforcing law
and order in the county
where those who remain are
growing older and poorer —
the median age is 65 and the
median income is $33,400.
As resources and populations
shrink, their job becomes
harder.
Former sheriff Hum-
phreys said he once caught
himself checking in for work
23 days in a row. This sum-
mer, undersheriff Elliott
worked 47 straight hours as
incident commander on a
46,000-acre wildfire.
“I really had no choice,”
Elliott said. “Downtime is
not part of the job.”
Elliott recently crafted the
department’s work sched-
ule for the next month. If he
isn’t on the clock, he is on
call. Every day. That means
he must remain within the
county and able to return a
phone or radio call within
minutes — all month.
“You can do that for a
while,” said Humphreys.
“But how long?”
Headquartered in the
basement of the county court
building in Fossil, deputies
must buy their own boots,
guns and bulletproof vests,
wear uniforms handed down
from other departments and
type up their reports on hand-
me-down computers. On
days off, deputies change
the oil and do brake work on
their own patrol cars.
To prepare for a recent sex
crimes trial, officers emptied
their evidence cage to make
a space for the defendant to
sit during court breaks. They
shuttled the man between the
courthouse and the jail —
located 100 miles away in
John Day — every morning
and evening for the length of
the trial.
Decision makers
For 23 years, Rick Shaf-
fer was public works director
for the city of Fossil, served
as the city’s volunteer fire
chief most of that time, and
is now volunteer director of
Wheeler County Fire and
Rescue. When he decided the
candidates in the November
2018 county commissioner
race were not sufficiently
supportive of the communi-
ty’s emergency responders,
he decided to mount a late
write-in campaign.
The campaign proved
successful — Shaffer, 70,
won the election by 57 votes.
Throughout Wheeler County,
362 people wrote in Shaf-
fer’s name, enough to out-
number Republican primary
winner Rick Paul. The com-
petitive, high stakes commis-
sioner race is one reason why
Wheeler had the highest per-
centage of voter turnout of
any county in Oregon: In the
midterm election, 84 percent
of registered voters returned
a ballot.
Shaffer, 70, is now tasked
with trying to figure out
how to keep Wheeler Coun-
ty’s police officers on the
job by making their work
manageable.
Paul, a cattle rancher who
lives in Mitchell, was disap-
pointed by the loss. He says
Wheeler County’s high taxes
and poor infrastructure show
that additional funding for
law enforcement would just
be wasted.
“Lot of pad in that bud-
get,” he said after the loss. “I
pin a lot of it on the sheriff.
(Humphreys) thinks he runs
the county. In some ways he
does. Doesn’t do a good job
of it.”
Shaffer doesn’t pin any-
thing anywhere.
“Most people don’t under-
stand what law enforcement
deals with,” he said.
Renee Heidy knows. Now
the director of the Frontier
911 dispatch center located in
Condon, she was serving as a
volunteer EMT more than a
decade ago when she heard a
call crackle across the emer-
gency radio. Jotting down the
address, she felt immediately
that the unnamed victim,
who had reportedly been run
over by a John Deere tractor
at a farm outside Maysville,
was her husband. He was a
mechanic and she knew he
was working on that farm
that day.
Heidy was right. Due to
policy, she had to respond
to the scene separate from
the ambulance. But respond
to the scene she did, giving
life-saving CPR and first aid.
Her husband would be air-
lifted out, spend 58 days in
the hospital and eventually
recover.
It’s not an uncommon
story for rural emergency
responders.
“One of the hardest parts
of rural EMS is a lot of the
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times we know the people we
are talking to and responding
to,” she said. “It puts a little
more emotional investment
into it. Even the domestics,
you can know both sides.”
That personal investment
can be emotionally drain-
ing. And sometimes hav-
ing to stay on an emergency
line with someone as they
wait impatiently for crews to
respond to a rural location —
a life hanging in the balance
— can be excruciating. Heidy
said that the first responders
to arrive on scene are often
volunteer EMS crews. In the
case of a medical emergency,
geography being what it is, it
may still take hours for a vic-
tim to get to a hospital after
EMTs arrive. In the case of a
criminal event, those volun-
teers arrive on scene armed
only with stun guns.
Shaffer knows what those
moments are like. He has
responded to thousands of
scenes in more than three
decades on the job — some
deadly, some dangerous,
plenty mundane.
“There are few places in
Wheeler County that don’t
trigger those memories of an
accident or fire that happened
there,” he said. “Every day,
I remember responding to
some scene.”
But Shaffer, despite taking
on a new position in county
government and turning 70,
plans to continue responding
to emergencies, no matter the
toll it has taken on him.
“Age is going to keep me
from doing this job before
... what do they call it ...
PTSD?” he said. “I’ll stop
because I’ll get too old, not
because of that.”
Undersheriff Elliott says
he — and the sheriff’s office
— appreciate all the volun-
teer help they can get. But
emergency professionals in
frontier Oregon are finding it
harder to rely on volunteers
as their numbers dwindle.
“The fact is, when some-
one calls 911 in Wheeler
County, there are only four
people who are getting paid
to respond,” he said.