photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Chief Rich Llewellyn is pictured on Sept. 1, 2022, at the LDCFM Administration building at 1911 Stewart Ave.

Lawrence’s new fire chief has come a long way — from a region full of mountains to a Midwestern city known for one “mount” — and he’s excited for his next chapter.

Rich Llewellyn was sworn in as Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical’s chief on Aug. 26, though he arrived two weeks prior after two 15-hour days of driving in a pickup truck with his wife and six dogs from Washington State. He is the permanent replacement for Chief Shaun Coffey, who retired in November.

“It was quite the adventure getting out here,” Llewellyn said. “We got to town on a Tuesday. I started my new job on Wednesday.”

Dogs are a passion that brought Llewellyn and his wife, Holly, together years ago. The two currently own three Cane Corsos, a type of Italian mastiff, and three Chihuahuas. He said Holly is planning to volunteer at the Lawrence Humane Society.

“I met my wife at a dog day care, and we each had three dogs when we met, so we’re a blended dog family. We had seven dogs at one point through life circumstances. So, we considered ourselves the Brady Bunch,” Llewellyn said.

Dogs aren’t the only members of the family though; Llewellyn also has twin sons who live in Vancouver, Canada, he said.

The call to duty

Llewellyn grew up in Naches, Washington, a small community near the Cascade Mountains, and that is where he first discovered his interest in firefighting.

“I was home from college one summer and volunteered for a really small fire department in the community where I grew up. I didn’t get to go on a lot of calls, but the few calls that I went on really made it clear that this was a career field that was right for me. It just felt right. It felt right to be out in the community, helping people versus what I envisioned and gone to college for is more of a desk job. Ironically, that’s where I’m at today,” Llewellyn said.

Standing nearly as tall as the fire trucks in a Lawrence fire station bay, Llewellyn said he planned to play basketball while studying business administration at Washington State University in the early 1990s, but those plans were dashed after he received a knee injury in his first season. Instead of playing basketball the next year, he joined the university’s fire department.

“I started there that winter, and in the next year I got hired by the Washington State University Fire Department as a resident firefighter. So we lived on campus and responded to emergencies on campus. It really feels like coming full circle in my career to come back to the university town and to serve that community,” he said.

Moving to Kansas

Basketball was the only thing Llewellyn really knew about Lawrence when he first learned about the open chief’s position on a national firefighters job board.

“I didn’t know much about Lawrence, but as a basketball player living in the late ’80s I knew about Danny Manning and knew he played at Kansas. At my house we only had three channels — it was pretty old school — but I had friends with ESPN, so we would watch basketball and the Kansas games. That’s the extent I knew of Lawrence, but the more I looked into it the better the community looked, and it looked like a true fit for us,” Llewellyn said.

When he visited for his interview he said it felt like home. Llewellyn left a job as assistant fire chief in Everett, Washington, in Snohomish County just north of Seattle to come to Lawrence. He was worried about leaving the mountain hiking trails and fly-fishing streams he had come to know, but so far Kansas has surprised him.

“As I was researching Lawrence, one of the things I found was that the college was built on Mount Oread. So I had to look. Driving home from the office (in Washington) I could see Mount Rainier one way and Mount Baker the other way, and they’re 10,000 foot volcanoes with the word mount attached to it. Here I am now on the Great Plains and I am loving it. People told us Kansas was flat and dusty, but I haven’t seen that so far in Lawrence,” Llewellyn said.

Ground zero for COVID-19

Llewellyn started In Everett in 2018. Like the rest of the country, he was not expecting the changes that came in the spring of 2020.

“The very first known COVID patient in the U.S. was diagnosed in Everett and was at an isolation facility, and we could see it out the window of our meeting room. So COVID hit us first. And it was something that we were prepared for, but it caused us to quickly shift and we had to shift our paradigms frequently. Initially, we anticipated it was going to be something like Ebola and we had specific Ebola transport rigs that were set up. I actually went to an incident with a suspected COVID patient. We had the Ebola rig come down and transport the patient, and as cases evolved very quickly, that was no longer a system that would work. Every crew was running on a COVID patient every day,” Llewellyn said.

Neighboring King County, home to Seattle, meanwhile, was seeing record case numbers, putting the area at the forefront of the learning curve.

“We anticipated potential problems with supply-chain issues and were prepared to buy equipment and already sourced it…. We had a PCR test machine early on, the COVID test machine. One of the first fire departments in the country to have it. One of the hallmarks of that effort was we came together as a county to make sure that our actions were all coordinated. Early on the county fire chiefs were meeting every day, and that evolved over time,” Llewellyn said.

Evolving strategies

Battling the virus took new technologies and strategies, but that ultimately translated to better emergency services overall, Llewellyn said, and those techniques encouraged his department to continue evolving the way it fought fires too. He saw the start of two new technologies that are saving lives and aiding emergency responders.

“If you can’t afford a helicopter as an organization, which very few can, drones are a great way to go. You can see thermal signatures either in the dark or even in the daylight. You can watch people in pitch black and make sure that they’re OK. We (LDCFM) actually just used a drone last night at an incident. Lawrence police were on scene and flew one of their drones for us to look at the roof of a strip mall that we were at with a fire incident,” Llewellyn said.

The other technology is an app called PulsePoint. The app delivers messages to off-duty emergency responders regarding the specific location of an emergency and if that incident is nearby they can respond to it, sometimes quicker than a 911 response, Llewellyn said.

“We have that here in Lawrence — that allows members of LDCFM to get more enhanced information about calls. They get information about calls that are going on in private residences … I’m really passionate about that program and think that it’s great for the community and for the early delivery of CPR. It allows people to know when there’s a cardiac arrest event and, if they’re willing, to go and help someone,” Llewellyn said.

Lead by following

The most important lesson Llewellyn said that came from the COVID era was the increased level of communication and collaboration with other agencies throughout the city and county.

“I’m really focused on an agenda of meeting the folks here and listening to the members of the organization. We want to make sure that we honor the work that’s been done already and progress on that. We (Lawrence) have a strategic plan that’s in place, and one of my goals is to make sure that we follow through on that strategic plan,” Llewellyn said.

Coming from the Seattle area, Llewellyn said he was a little wary of the standard Folgers coffee that the department brews each morning; before long he might be grinding his own beans, but if that proves to be the only conflict he has after moving such a long way he is more than happy to make Lawrence his new home.

“The feedback that I’ve seen says that the (Lawrence) community really respects the fire department and appreciates the fire department. We want to make sure that that is carried forward and that affiliation remains strong,” Llewellyn said.