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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Firefighters’ Faces Burning Bright Red

Wild sex, improper telephone calls, unsavory characters …

I finally must comment on the sleaze-ridden administration that has embarrassed itself.

No, not the Clinton White House. I’m as bored as everyone by the president’s chronic zipper mismanagement and assorted peccadillos.

When it comes to buffoonish soap operas, nothing beats the humiliating hijinx going on a couple of miles west of Spokane.

At the Airway Heights Fire Department.

This may be a teensy, mostly volunteer outfit in a hamlet of barely 4,000. But Airway Heights firefighters have extinguished themselves in ways that would make a Dalmatian blush.

“I have no idea why these things keep coming back and haunting me,” laments Toby Combs, Airway Heights’ beleaguered fire chief. “Airway Heights is like the Hillyard of the West Plains. We get no respect.”

Boy, there’s a slam on Hillyard.

The first alarm sounded last spring. Airway Heights officials doused two firefighters after it was discovered they were felons.

Not just any felons. One was a Hells Angel who had once poleaxed a federal cop. He resigned. The other was a convicted arsonist. He got the ax.

There is, of course, a certain logic in having a firebug in a firehouse. Smoke eaters would never lack for action. But having felons on board threatened the city’s $100,000 state prison contract.

The second alarm rang from the spirit world. Someone using a fire department telephone racked up $1,300 worth of calls to a psychic hotline.

If these soothsayers were as connected to the Great Beyond as they claim, you’d think one of them would have immediately warned the caller: “Hey, you bonehead, you’re gonna get burned!”

As it was, it took longer than it should have to track down the culprit.

That’s because Chief Toby jumped to the wrong conclusion when he saw 1-900 calls on the city telephone bill.

“Anybody calling a sex line?” Toby quizzed his troops.

Everyone looked as innocent as little lambs. The investigation expanded as more calls showed up on a second month’s bill.

Airway Heights police found a suspect by comparing duty logs to the times the calls were placed.

Bingo! The firefighter ‘fessed up, blaming a girlfriend for the calls. He paid the bill and quit the department.

One would think this would be a year’s worth of disaster for a giant federal bureaucracy, let alone a postage stamp-sized burg.

But Airway Heights is in a class by itself. This is a community that, during the last election, had a paroled murderer running for City Council.

He lost. Having an elected killer was too much even for Airway Heights. “Pretty soon we’re going to be the laughingstock of the state of Washington,” muttered an embarrassed local barkeep.

Too late. If there were any doubts about Airway Heights’ standing in the universe, they were put to sleep last week when the third alarm sounded:

A thousand used condoms were fished out of the septic tank used by - you guessed it - the stalwart fire department volunteers.

Talk about burnin’ love.

“You hate to baby-sit everybody,” says Toby. “You’d think common sense would be enough.”

Apparently there have been a lot of unofficial late night drills at the ol’ fire station. The condom conundrum led to the resignations of volunteers who lived rent-free in the upper level of City Hall.

Some Airway Heights insiders wonder if Chief Toby will be next to go down in flames.

He could always call a psychic to find out.

No way, says the scorched chief. “I don’t need any heart attacks in my life. … I look at my horoscope well after the day’s over.”

, DataTimes