August 3, 2022 | Kathleen Allen

David Lindquist, Training Captain of the Lefthand Fire Protection District, is not a man who is daunted by a challenge. His achievements since joining Lefthand Fire Protection in an official capacity after his 10 years of volunteerism all illustrate an individual who is dedicated, focused, and responsive.

To call Lindquist a “go-getter” is an understatement.

After his decade of volunteering for the district and seeing the district change over that time, he left his 20-year career in print production and brought his organizational leadership, material handling training, and production practice training skills with him.

Chris O’Brien, Lefthand FPD Fire Chief, has nothing but praise for David’s efforts so far.

“[Lindquist] has reconfigured our training program to make it more robust and ensure that we have continuing development opportunities for all members on all levels,” O’Brien says.
That training program developed and flourished under Lindquist. As he tells it, he had his work cut out for him.

“One of the big things I took on when I started here was building and implementing an operational readiness system for our apparatus,” Lindquist says. “We found an app platform we could use and put in whatever needed to be checked, created a schedule and reporting structure to get us in compliance with NFPA 1911; and more importantly, for us to know our rigs are ready when called on.”

Lindquist is equally adept at organizational readiness.

“For an organization like ours that is primarily volunteer, and never had a formal program like this, it’s been a long road,” Lindquist says. “But we’re getting better and better, getting folks trained on how to check everything from our heavy chassis vehicles to medical supplies.”

Chief O’Brien walked us through Lindquist’s robust and hugely successful response in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With the start of and continuing through the variants, David has assembled and developed our COVID response procedures including PPE kits and appropriate disposal, ensuring our members are up to speed on current health guidelines and expectations, and developing the capacity to continue to deliver relevant fire/EMS monthly training while ensuring we are kept COVID safe,” Chief O’Brien said.

To Lindquist’s credit, his determinism paid off.

“To date our agency has only experienced 3 cases of COVID as a result of these efforts.”

Training and pandemic response efforts aren’t the only place Lindquist has focused his attention.

“In the two years we’ve been running the program, we’ve caught a number of issues including mechanical failures, equipment that wasn’t put back into service fully as well as identifying needs that we didn’t know we had,” Lindquist says. “All of these have made our work safer, whether that’s responding to a fire on a rig or training, or performing any of our daily calls for service.”

There’s more ahead than behind for Lefthand Fire Protection’s Training Captain. 2022 holds large goals for Lindquist.

Lindquist comments that his plans include updating and developing standard practices for operational readiness, vehicle checks, training and response.

“This will align how we perform with our documentation and help future generations take what we’ve started and build on it,” he says.

If history is any indication, Lindquist is up for the challenge.

A big thank you to Lefthand Fire Protection District for nominating David!

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