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2023 Was Another Busy Year For Arnolds Park-Okoboji Fire & Rescue

March 13, 2024 Steve Schwaller

(Okoboji)– 2023 was another busy year for Arnolds Park-Okoboji Fire and Rescue. Fire Chief Chris Yungbluth presented his annual report at last (Tues.) evening’s Okoboji City Council meeting…

“A majority of our responses is for fire alarms. We have a lot of those in our area between the condos and the big buildings and things like that. We had several hazardous materials calls, a few more motor vehicle crashes than we’ve seen in the past. I don’t know that I can really relate that to any construction issues, it was just more accidents in our area. We did respond to four structure fires, three vehicle fires, three smoke odor calls which is usually in a structure, four I classified as miscellaneous; one of them was removing a carcass of a moose off the lake was one of the weird things that we’ve done that we’ll never see again, hopefully anyways. Two water rescue and two dive rescue call outs that our dive team put divers in the water to rescue a victim. And we did have our fastest recovery since my time on the department for a drowning victim where we arrived on the scene and recovered the victim within less than two minutes after we arrived on the scene, so that’s our fastest recovery that we’ve had as a dive team since I’ve been on the department.”

Yungbluth adds they’re requesting an additional $35,000 in funding from both Okoboji and Arnolds Park to reflect significant increases in worker’s compensation and general liability insurance premiums as well as for increased maintenance to trucks and buildings.

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