At a recent meeting of the Zephyr Volunteer Fire Department, Casandra Reiger was elected Fire Chief, the first woman Fire Chief in Brown County.

Casandra Reiger is a native of Bangs and a graduate of Bangs High School.  She has lived in Zephyr for eight years, and works full-time at Brownwood High School as a para-professional in the Life Skills classroom and in the special education department.  Reiger has been a volunteer fire fighter in Zephyr for five years, and held various jobs within the Department.  On November 7 she was nominated for the position of Fire Chief and elected.  “It’s voted on by our members,” said Reiger.  “Our members put their trust in me to lead them in the Department, and I am humbled by that.”

When asked why she wanted to be a volunteer fire fighter, she replied:  “It’s pretty simple really.  I want to help people.  I have always been a big believer in being a part of something bigger than myself.  When I first found out about the Fire Department I noticed such a huge shortage in volunteers.  I asked around to family members and friends, stopped by one day and looked around and told myself ‘This is what I want to do, this is where I want to be.’ ”

Reiger has taken some fire-fighting training from the Texas A&M TEEX (Texas A&M Engineering Extension) academy.  She has completed the Wildland Firefighting Type 2 training, and has plenty more training to take now that she is Fire Chief.  The Zephyr VFD has sixteen volunteer fire fighters, and they all receive training.  They also meet quarterly with the Brown County First Responders organization, and receive some EMT training there.

The Zephyr FVD gets called out about once or twice a week; Reiger estimated that they have been called out about sixty times this year so far.  Most of their calls are for grass fires, but they also fight structure fires.  “We also get called to help Early with structure fires, and Brownwood as well, and vice-versa.  They come and help us.”

The VFD receives no tax dollars.  “We receive funding from several sources,” said Reiger.  “A combination of local grants, state grants with the Texas A&M Forest Service, and a few federal grants under FEMA.  However, we receive most of our funding from the awesome people we serve through donations.  If it wasn’t for those people, we would not be able to survive as an organization.”

Now that Casandra Reiger is Fire Chief, she is working on priorities and goals.  “Our job as volunteer firefighters and officers is to very wisely spend our donated money on things that benefit us, it’s not meant to stockpile.  My first act as Chief is to purchase structural firefighting gear for our members using a Texas Forest Service grant.  Some of our gear is old and out of date.  A lot of it was donated from area departments, for which we are very grateful, but it is simply not adequate enough for what we do.”

Reiger mentioned four areas she wants to improve:

*** Personal Protection Equipment – “PPE is my utmost concern.  I want to keep our people safe.”

*** Equipment – “My next step is an always evolving one, fire apparatus.  We can’t fight fire or cut people out of wrecked vehicles if we don’t have the correct apparatus for the job.  We make do with what we have but we aren’t where we want to be.  My main focus is the age of the fleet.  We have one brush truck that is around the five-year-old mark, but everything else is twenty years and older.  We would like to replace our older trucks with newer, more capable apparatus.”

*** Training – “Training is everything.  If you don’t train, you can’t do the job the right way. In the past year we have rallied up with other departments in Brown County for joint training and it has helped tremendously.  Training together makes operations on the scene safer and more efficient.  We know what they are doing, and they know what we are doing.”

*** Volunteers – “The volunteer firefighting world is lacking people.  If this interests you, I encourage you to follow our Facebook page, send us a message, come see what we do.  We would love to have you!”

Casandra Reiger said she was surprised — and pleased — that the Zephyr Volunteer Fire Department wanted her to be their Chief.  To her current group of volunteers, and any new prospective volunteers, she has a message:  “All I can say to them is they better strap in and get ready, we’re only going up from here on!”