7 minute read
LOCAL
Chief Zick responds to residents on wildfire danger and emergency medical response
By Peter Zick, Lyons Fire Chief Redstone Review
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LYONS – I want to thank our community for the great participation in our telephone town hall meeting. As a reminder you can listen to the entire session by going to our web page, www.lyonsfire.org. We had approximately 150 attend the meeting, and we answered some great questions that folks called in with. I feel it is so important for the community to be involved when we discuss our challenges. In the days after the event, I received many emails that thanked us for holding the event and all the emails expressed support for our fire district.
After reviewing the session, we found there were two main issues that came to the forefront in the questions asked that evening or that were left as messages after the event. First, the concern about wildfire impacting our community seemed to be on the minds of many people in our community. As I expressed at the event, this is a major concern for us also. There are three ways we can start to make our community safer from wildfire, and this will be my focus as your Fire Chief.
First, we need to plan and organize for communitybased mitigation in our neighborhoods. This means not only focusing on the individual homeowner to mitigate their property, but the whole neighborhood working together to protect each other.
Second, we need to ensure that if a wildfire does occur, that your Lyons Fire Department is able to get our equipment out of the station as quickly as possible so that we can respond in a timely manner in order to start protecting the homes that are threatened.
Lastly, we need to ensure that we have adequate staffing on that equipment so that when we do arrive at a fire, we have enough people to do everything we can to protect your
homes and loved ones. As I explained during the town hall meeting, this is our biggest challenge today. My goal is to bring the Lyons Fire Protection District into compliance with national and local standards for response times and staffing. The second area with the most concern was emergency medical response in our community, and the need for advanced life support (paramedics) to arrive within the national and local standards. Our current response times for the first paramedic to arrive on the scene of an emergency medical call is well above the national and local standards of four to six minutes. My goal will be to not only improve our staffing for fire responses but also to have paramedics Zick with advanced life support equipment on our fire trucks to quickly provide that service when we arrive. I want to close by thanking our community for being involved with the Lyons Fire Protection District. It was a great accomplishment to see so many members of our community call in, or email, with the same concerns that we have. I will continue to work hard to resolve these challenges so we can make our community as safe as possible. Thank you so much for all of your support during these challenging times.
Peter Zick is the fire chief for the Lyons Fire Protection District.
A unity agenda: tackling the mental health crisis and the opioid epidemic
By U.S. Congressman Joe Neguse Redstone Review
BOULDER – Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to represent our great state at President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Address. During his speech, he laid out a unity agenda for the nation: beat the opioid epidemic, take on mental health, support our veterans, and combat cancer.
As President Biden said in his remarks, these are four big things that we can do together, and that we must get done.
I couldn’t agree more. Each are issues of vital importance to our nation, to our communities and to the health and well being of so many individuals. During my time in Congress, our team has introduced countless bills in this vein, working with local healthcare professionals, parents, teachers, universities, and mental health providers to find creative, effective solutions to reduce the number of opioid-caused deaths in our state, and to ensure all Coloradans can access mental health care and fulfill the promises we’ve made to our nation’s veterans. I shared in a recent column the work we are doing to support our veterans through expanded access to health care, mental health care, job training and career services, so I want to share more about our work on mental health and substance abuse prevention in particular. Over the last year, as I’ve visited with hospital workers, they shared the dramatic increase in mental health related emergency department visits they’ve witnessed due to the pandemic, not just in children and young adults but for individuals of every age. Recently, Colorado Children’s Hospital even declared a “state of emergency” for youth mental health following a major increase in attempted suicides among kids.
As a member of the Bipartisan Addiction and Mental Health Task Force, I’ve been working in Congress to promote policies that address the addiction and mental health crisis in America. I know the level of heartbreak this crisis has caused, and it is because of it that we are devoted to increasing access to mental health and behavioral services so that we can support the thousands of struggling families.
That’s also why I introduced the CARE for Mental Health Professionals Act, legislation to reform licensure to expand interstate access to mental health resources, making care more accessible by telehealth and easier to access for rural communities.
Given the worsening and more dangerous wildfires we’ve seen in our community and across Colorado, the mental health of our wildland firefighters is also a very real and growing concern. My legislation – the Care for Our Firefighters Act and Tim’s Act –would ensure trauma-informed mental health resources for wildland firefighters, including a mental health awareness campaign, peer-to-peer support network, mental health leave and expansion of the Critical Incident Stress Management Program.
Additionally, my bipartisan Youth Substance Abuse Act would reauthorize an effective and successful youth substance abuse initiative to get more young people effective public health and safety support. As you may know, in 2021, 767 individuals in Colorado died due to an overdose of fentanyl. This is a crisis and one we must address with urgency – through increased funding for prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery.
Since coming to Congress I have also worked to increase suicide prevention funding to states and college campuses and to secure health care resources for rural and mountain areas of our district where access to
providers and comprehensive care is scarce. We know that side effects of mental illnesses like stress, anxiety, depression, and isolation have a direct impact on the opioid epidemic, with many Americans fighting both battles simultaneously. It is absolutely critical, therefore, that we proNeguse vide necessary mental health support, intervention, treatment, and recovery resources for all those impacted by the opioid crisis and substance abuse epidemic. I was grateful to the President’s attention to these issues in his address, and look forward to partnering as we work to get these done. While our work is just getting started, I know that these are often deeply personal issues to many Coloradans, and I believe it is crucial that we approach them with the utmost urgency so that all those struggling can have the hope necessary to heal.
Congressman Joe Neguse represents Colorado’s Second District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to his first term in November 2018, becoming the first African-American member of Congress in Colorado history. He serves as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the House Natural Resources Committee and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
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