Philomath Fire and Rescue will be closing the fire district’s substation at Wren, Fire Chief Chancy Ferguson said Thursday morning.
“The family that owns the property has chosen to not renew that lease,” Ferguson said. “We will be closing that station in the next 30 days.”
Beyond the situation with the lease, Ferguson said the district has struggled to maintain an effective and safe operation from the substation in recent years with only a single volunteer.
Referred to by the fire district as Station 202 and located at 34925 Wren Road, the property is owned by Michael and Susan Brown, according to county property records. The substation was renamed in memory of William P. “Pat” Brown, who served as a fire department volunteer from 1981 until his death in 1999.
Although a sign on the building lists 1980 as its construction year, an article that appeared in January 1981 in the Corvallis Gazette-Times reported that architectural plans for the new substation were being reviewed with hopes that the presence in the rural area would “reduce initial response time to fires in the Wren area by five to 10 minutes” and that “it would be manned by volunteers who live in Wren.”
“For the last seven years that I’ve been here, we were down to one volunteer in the Wren area,” Ferguson said. “Just all factors combined together (were) leading to the closure of that station.”
Included in a news release announcing the closure, the fire district thanked “the Brown family for the 46 years of additional support in the Wren area.”
Philomath Fire and Rescue’s presence in Wren may not be completely in the past. Ferguson said the district is seeking options with the Brown family to return to the vicinity
“If land-use laws change and more population where call volume goes out there, we’ll have an option … a place to build a station out there,” Ferguson said. “We’re working through that right now with them and legal (counsel) to figure out what, when and where that property will take place.”
The fire chief said less than 1% of the fire district’s call volume goes to Wren.
“It’s out there a ways and it’s all timber and ag-type land and kind of sparsely populated,” Ferguson said. “Population drives call volume.”
Ferguson said that back when the station was built, it was staffed “by about eight volunteers that lived within that area and it made sense to have an engine.”
The substation’s location is 5.2 miles from the main station in Philomath and 6.4 miles from the Hoskins-Kings Valley Rural Fire station.
Fire and Rescue officials said the closure would not impact its current response model.
“Our response has and will continue to be primarily provided by our Main Street station with both paid and volunteer 24/7 advanced life support responders,” according to the news release.
In 2022, Former Fire Chief Tom Miller attempted to put a plan in place to staff the substation with paid employees and resident volunteers, a move that he said would increase response times and better support rural areas. The fire district’s master plan in place at the time called for improvements, including the eventual construction of a new apparatus bay and rebuilding the station.
However, the fire chief’s plans were met with concerns from the volunteer association and firefighters’ union in several areas, including safety and the logistics of such an operation. A dispute carried on for months and reached the point of filed complaints and no-confidence votes. Miller and the fire district parted ways in September 2022.
The fire district’s board of directors approved the Wren substation’s closure during its Monday afternoon meeting.