Fire Chief Joe Page reflects on career in Whitefish

Firefighters encounter different scenarios every day so they develop the ability to think quickly, remain flexible and prioritize in order to make sound decisions. A long career in firefighting has prepared Whitefish Fire Chief Joe Page for the challenges he is facing upon his retirement.

On July 5, the date of his retirement from the Whitefish Fire Department, Joe Page was in Spokane, helping his wife, Michele, recover from a stroke she suffered in January. He traveled back and forth from Whitefish to Spokane for a few months and has spent most of the last two months by her side at an assisted nursing facility.

Michele is able to speak and has a good memory, but she did lose use of the left side of her body. Fortunately, she is showing improvement — slowly and steadily. Page said she’s teaching one half of the brain to pick up for the half she’s lost.

Family medical issues hastened Page’s retirement and after sufficient recovery time, he and his wife of 15 years will move to Arizona to be closer to family. Michele has two brothers and two sisters in the Phoenix area.

“We definitely enjoyed Montana. It's a beautiful area,” Page said. “The diversity of things to do is wonderful, so it’s sad that we're having to move, but with my wife's current health conditions, we’re not going to be able to come back to Whitefish.”

Page has served as the Fire Chief of the Whitefish Fire Department since 2015 after being hired by the department two years earlier.

“Whitefish was definitely a fun and challenging career,” Page said. “It's a very diverse department. Besides structure fire fighting, I'm really proud of the Emergency Medical Service, the ambulance service that Whitefish provides.”

He said Whitefish presents unique challenges to the fire department.

“One of the struggles… is the huge area the men and women protect,” he said. “They provide fire protection not only to the city of Whitefish but also [to the] surrounding Whitefish Fire Service Area and the ambulance also serves the Olney Fire District.”

The Whitefish Fire Service Area is the 86 square miles around Whitefish that contracts with the City of Whitefish for fire protection. That’s 55,000 acres of land that contain over 3,000 residences.

“It's a huge area and so, of course, staffing is always an issue for the department to have enough people on hand,” he said. “[We] definitely have a great working relationship with the neighboring departments which truly helps – Columbia Falls, Evergreen, West Valley, Big Mountain, Kalispell.”

The Whitefish Fire Department is a combination department that currently has 17 full-time firefighters, one part-time firefighter and four volunteers. Page said part of the reason it struggles to find volunteers is that it is a retirement/tourist town.

Additionally, the huge tourist influx makes it difficult to do a lot of pre-planning for things like evacuations because there are times when a large percentage of the population is unfamiliar with the area.

“We also had to deal with the wildland fire threat and the hazardous material threat with the BNSF railroad running right through the middle of the community,” Page added. “Thankfully, we didn’t have a lot to deal with but it is one of the threats that is there every day.”

While some would find the uncertainty and heavy responsibility of the job overwhelming, those are the elements that kept Page in the business for so long.

“There's a lot of diversity to the job which makes the job exciting,” he said. “You never know what the day’s going to be.”

AFTER GROWING up in Harrison, New York, Page attended New York City Community College and earned his degree in architectural technology. He worked on architectural lighting projects before beginning his career as a printed circuit board designer for a variety of electronics companies.

In 1983, when he bought his first house in South Salem, New York, he joined the Vista Volunteer Fire Department with the hope of getting to know his new community.

“I joined to meet my neighbors and get the inside scoop about the community,” he recalled. “I’ve definitely been hooked into fire service since then. It was really a way to get to know the community quickly.”

Job changes took Page to New Hampshire where he volunteered for the Amherst New Hampshire Fire Department and then to Carmel, New York, where he volunteered for its fire department. He worked his designer job remotely when he moved to Colorado, volunteered for the Elk Creek Fire Department and coached freshman football.

He said he convinced the Elk Creek Fire Department that they needed a full-time training officer.

“I switched careers then and was hired as the training officer,” Page said. “Worked there, became battalion chief, acting chief, then the opening in Whitefish happened.”

He said he enjoyed the fire service because the job was different every day. He said living in close quarters and having meals together made the department feel like a second family, along with the occasional fun wager.

“When I first started in the fire department, if you got your picture in the paper, you had to buy beer for everybody. And that’s now changed to ice cream for everybody,” he said light-heartedly. “I got in the real good habit of running away when the cameras came out.”

Page spent so much time working, he said that’s what he did for fun, too.

“I worked. My wife always teased me — that’s what I was going to do ‘til the day I die, is be in the fire department,” he said. “It is a 24-hour-a-day business that works every day so you never get too far away from it.”

Page has three grown sons, two in Maine and one in Scotland, and looks forward to visiting them. He and Michele are members of the Glacier Unitarian Universal Fellowship as well as Authors of the Flathead. Page said Michele had been writing a couple screenplays and novels, one of which is nearly ready for publication, while he’s “just dabbling.”

Although he has a lot on his plate, he is equipped to deal with the challenges. He enjoyed his time in the fire service and is aware of his good fortune when it comes to long-term effects of the job’s many occupational hazards.

“I'm happy to get out of the fire service. My knees are still in pretty good shape, my shoulders and my back,” he said. “For the guys doing the fire service, definitely walking away healthy is a big thing.”