Desire to Serve, Ability to Perform, and Courage to Act
The Onalaska Fire Department's mission is to protect and enhance the quality of life for its residents, employees, visitors, and businesses with responsive and comprehensive programs focused on fire prevention, public education, and emergency response while providing the highest quality of emergency management for medical, fire, hazardous material, and other disaster type emergencies.
Emergency services for the 21st century must improve organizational efficiency while maintaining operational effectiveness through the proper integration of people, technology, and education. This can be achieved by employing resource sharing, community partnership, and joint training programs. To promote these initiatives, leadership styles must inspire the values of trust, teamwork, and continuous improvement.
As a well diverse, trained, and integrated department, OFD is staffed with 11 active (full-time) and 25 reserve (paid-on-call) firefighters dedicated in providing a Fire District comprised of three communities the best round-the-clock services possible. Onalaska Fire Department's vision is being extraordinary today - being the best it can be in:
Facility inspections.
Code enhancement.
Risk management.
Incident response.
Onalaska Fire Department's mission is focused on saving lives and protecting property by
Creating a safer community to live and work.
Providing the best and safest fire and first responder protection possible.
Educating children, adults, and businesses on the dangers of fire.
Developing fire and fall prevention programs for senior citizen communities.
Being leaders and role models within the community.
Onalaska Fire Department's 2010 goals are focused on providing measurable levels of service and acceptable risk by:
Reorganization of the pay structure for paid-on-call personnel. New pay structure will focus upon the educational and training levels, along with the firefighter’s knowledge, skills and abilities.
The reorganization will provide a consistent level of service to our residents, and identify a career path for firefighters.
Develop and schedule mandatory training consistent with the essential functions which firefighters are expected to be proficient.
Actively pursue funding through grant opportunities.
Initiation of training that will focus on the health and fitness of fire personnel.
The exploration of forming a county wide MABAS (Mutual Automatic Box Alarm System) The establishment of a MABAS Group will define a standardized and predetermined response to participating fire departments. This system will improve the utilization and effectiveness of the current mutual aid plan.
Continuing to provide excellent and professional service to our residents in a cost effective manner.
