Learning by ‘trial by fire’: CCFR Chief Rich Etheridge recalls career after retirement announcement
- Jasz Garrett
- Sep 30
- 8 min read
Patience is a virtue when it comes to overseeing an all-hazards fire department
By Jasz Garrett
Juneau Independent
Capital City Fire/Rescue Chief Rich Etheridge is retiring this fall. He began his career in 1991. He saw Juneau’s five fire departments consolidate into one, national advancements in medication and technology, and CCFR’s increased responses to mental health.
In an interview last week, he shared some of his biggest highlights.
“Watching people that come in brand new to the fire department that have never even been on a fire truck before and just watching their careers progress,” Etheridge said. “We’ve had people move south and become fire chiefs in other places. We have Chief (Sam) Russell here in town that started as a volunteer, and I’ve been able to watch him go from a firefighter to a paramedic to a captain and now an assistant chief. We’ve got lots of people in the organization that come in just brand new, wide-eyed, no clue what they’re going to do, and just how they really flourish and turn into super amazing professional rescuers.”
Etheridge was once brand new to CCFR himself. After he graduated from Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, he took a forest technology class at the Alaska Vocational Technical Center, which included wildland firefighting and EMT. He secured a summer job with the Alaska Division of Forestry, where he worked as a wildland firefighter on the Kenai Peninsula.
“I wanted to do that full-time, but wildland firefighting at that time was very seasonal, and I have year-round bills, so I started looking at the structural side of firefighting,” Etheridge said.
When he was still a volunteer firefighter, CCFR was involved with the 1996 cruise ship fire on the 617-foot Universe Explorer. There were five crewmen fatalities after a fire started in the laundry room.
“They pulled into Auke Bay and we sent some folks out there, small fire teams to help their crews,” he said. “Then we got to work on the fire investigation part of it.”
His first call as an incident commander was responding to the fire that razed the historic Skinner building in 2004.
“I didn’t even get a chance to practice on a car fire or something small like that,” Etheridge said.
The major fire burned two buildings downtown, causing an evacuation. Etheridge had training, but it was different applying it in a real-life scenario.
“The cruise ships left port early just to get out of the smoke,” he recalled. “You make mistakes and you learn from them. We had a smoke explosion happen inside the building while we had people in there, and it was still early in the fire, so we didn't have backup crews at that time. That was a huge lesson for me to make sure that we’ve got crews on standby to go rescue.”
Etheridge said another lesson he learned in his career is patience.
“Nothing happens nearly as fast as you think it’s going to,” he said. “When you’re trying to start new programs or create new positions in the department, everything takes two or three times longer than you would anticipate that it would take. Trying to purchase large equipment like a fire engine. Now, from the time we decide we’re going to place an order, it could be up to four years before it actually arrives. You really have to start doing a lot of forward thinking.”
He said the future chief needs that skill, along with the ability to listen and talk to people. Etheridge plans to stay until he can help whoever is selected as the new chief settle into the position.
CCFR is an all-hazards fire department, meaning firefighters also respond to landslides, avalanches and floods.
“It’s a really complex department,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts. We’ve got the airport firefighting component, that's kind of a whole standalone portion of the department. Then we contract with the airport to provide all the fire and EMS protection out there. We’ve got the regular ambulance service that everybody’s familiar with and the structural firefighting stuff that everybody’s familiar with.”
Etheridge was the fire chief during the first major Suicide Basin glacial lake outburst in 2023. He said CCFR had the most involvement in 2024, when floodwaters damaged approximately 300 homes in the Mendenhall Valley.
“We would take pickup trucks and we would go to people’s houses to get them out of the floodwaters,” he said. “People would have medical emergencies. We’d park the ambulance where it was dry, and then we’d go pick up the patient and bring them out to the ambulance. People would be stuck on their car and then just couldn't wade through the floodwater. We would bring a boat out and put them in a boat and then get them.”
He said they were prepared for injuries or fatalities, but thankfully encountered none. This year, the department’s decision was not to drive around as much, because they learned driving a vehicle through floodwaters creates a wave, pushing the water further into homes. Etheridge said CCFR stood by on Aug. 13, but did not receive any phone calls.
“The HESCO barriers did a fantastic job,” Etheridge said. “Tlingit and Haida, and then emergency management for the city, they did such a great job pre-planning. Everybody knew what they were going to do, and we just stood by and waited. So, as far as floods, this was kind of one of the least impactful ones for us.”
The fire department also responds to search and rescue operations on trails, but primarily relies on other agencies, such as the Alaska State Troopers and Juneau Mountain Rescue. Etheridge said interagency communication is important. CCFR also works closely with the Juneau Police Department and Southeast Alaska Dogs Organized for Ground Search.
CCFR has assisted with landslides in Wrangell and Haines. A small team has gone to assist with the disaster itself or run day-to-day medical calls. Etheridge said coordinating this is unique and it allows Juneau firefighters to understand how smaller departments operate. He said as a state capital, Juneau has the resources to help out, whether it be providing an extra axe or training.
The fire department of Alaska’s capital city has its own challenges with staffing and resources.
“Challenges: one, not having another agency close by that can come back us up when we get six or seven ambulance calls deep,” Etheridge said. “Or if we have big structure fires, we have to make some of the medical calls wait for a little while. We have to kind of triage those. Is it an emergent, immediate thing, we need to pull people off the fire and send them? Or is it something minor that can wait for 15 or 20 minutes?”
He said sometimes it is difficult to make these decisions, but other times it’s cut-and-dry. These are choices he has faced his entire career.
“We had a fire in Churchill Trailer Court that we had a chest pain possible CPR call right in the middle of, so we peeled half the firefighters off of that and it was just a small handful towards the end of a fire,” Etheridge said.
He said there is immense overtime for staff with people leaving for family medical leave with injuries or maternity/paternity leave, putting the burden on other firefighters to fill the overtime slots. This year, the department had seven vacancies, but filled five with intern positions. Etheridge said retention will help with the staffing issue.
“Make this a place that people want to stay and spend their entire career,” Etheridge said. “When I started, there was very little turnover. Once you got a job, you stayed here for 20 years, where now people stay three to five years and they’re starting to look for other places to go higher. The retirement program’s mobile so they can go anywhere in the country with their retirement. Whereas, if you get 10 or 15 years into your career with the old retirement system, you’re going, 'Well, I’m going to stick it out because I'm that close to retirement,' so it kind of forces you to want to stick around for some of those rough years.”
Etheridge recommended firefighting as an alternative for those who aren’t interested in college.
“You can come into the fire service as a brand new person with no experience, and we’ll put you through firefighting, through EMT, we’ll send you to paramedic school, leadership training,” he said. “We pay for all that stuff and the opportunities it opens up is just amazing. I’ve been able to travel all over the nation, attending classes.”
He said volunteers help fill the gaps, but like the employees, it’s difficult for them to find a work-life balance. The department plans to advertise apprenticeship opportunities in the spring to fill future vacant positions. Fire mechanic Scott Reid and airport firefighter Mark Fuette are expected to retire in the next year.
Etheridge said his decision to retire was because he is getting older. He looked around him and realized that the friends he had grown up fighting fires with were all retired. He plans to stay in Juneau and continue making odds and ends full-time with his 12-year-old business, Fairweather Woodworks.
“I’m making a little bit of everything,” he said. “I’m making doors for a sailboat right now. I’m making blanket-weaving looms for Tlingit weavers, pens and bowls, and you name it.”
For the future of CCFR, Etheridge said he would like to see the department’s mobile health program expand.
“I think that portion of the department is going to be just as busy as the ambulance portion,” he said. “What those folks do is they go out in the community and they solve problems before they become 911 incidents. It all started with COVID where we had people that were stuck home with COVID and the doctors didn’t want them coming into their office, so we would go take vital signs and take the medicines and give them shots. We started seeing the need for that type of care in the community.”
Etheridge said following the pandemic, the need persists. The medics receive specialty training by working with Bartlett Regional Hospital. In the past, the EMTs and paramedics learned by “trial by fire.” Their response to mental health now helps JPD and the ambulances.
“We’ve got the sobering center side, which people see the van around town,” he said. “CARES is the big umbrella organization we created. And then under CARES, we’ve got the sobering center. We’ve got the mobile integrated health and now we’ve got the Crisis Now program, and the Crisis Now runs on primarily psychological issues, depression or suicide attempt type stuff. It’s one of our medics and then a counselor from Bartlett Hospital. They go out and meet people wherever they’re at.”
Etheridge left his advice for future firefighters.
“Remember the excitement and why you joined because that’s what's going to carry you through the years when you’ve had tough calls or you’re just having a tough time coming into work for a period of time,” he said.
For the chief, the excitement comes from problem-solving.
“We’re presented with so many different things from a kid that gets their finger stuck in a hole on a playground to major buildings on fire and trying to figure out how to keep it from spreading to other buildings,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to be presented with. And if you could dream up an emergency, we’ve got to come up with a plan to figure out.”
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.
