Town of Greenville

Fire Department

Mission statement:
“To protect and preserve the lives and property of our Greenville residents with the highest levels of fire suppression, rescue services and emergency medical care through continual training, public education and fire prevention programs.”

Message from the chief:

Dear Greenville Residents,

First off, I am honored to be the fire chief for this wonderful community.  For those of you who don’t know me, my wife, Cheryl, and I along with our 2 children, Ben and Danielle, moved to Greenville from Black Creek in 1991.  While a resident in Black Creek, I was a member of the volunteer fire department for 8 years.  During that time, I served as a volunteer fire fighter and assistant chief.  During my 19 years as a Greenville resident, I have served as a volunteer fire fighter for 18 years, and deputy chief for the last several years.  I have also been a part of the first responder group for 12 years.

I am privileged to work with a great colleague, Deputy Chief Tim Lambie.  He too, has many years of firefighting experience.  In addition to working with Deputy Chief Lambie, I am honored to work closely with Fire Prevention Officer Eric Kitowski.  He is the only full-time firefighter in the Town of Greenville.  Officer Kitowski takes on the responsibility of manning the station during the work week and also conducts fire inspections for commercial businesses in the town twice a year.  

For several years now, the fire department and first responder groups have been challenged to keep up with the rapid growth of the community.  Some strategies we have implemented to beat this challenge without increasing our budget are: mutual aid with the Airport Fire Department and automatic mutual aid with the Clayton-Winchester Fire Department on the South end of our town.  We continue to maintain a close relationship with our other mutual aid departments.  Most recently, we were one of the first fire departments in Outagamie County to implement the MABAS system (mutual aid box alarm system).  This is a pre-planned incident paging system that we use for large scaled incidents.  For example, we would implement this paging system for a structure fire.   The Outagamie County Communication Center would automatically dispatch our mutual aid departments as they are stated in the computer system to provide help in an organized manner. 

Continued education is very important to our department.  Our members participate in two practice drills each month along with classroom work.  We also have classes throughout the state that members can attend.  These include weekend classes on firefighting techniques and safety, night classes for fire investigation, arson investigation, driver/operator, etc.  This summer, we will be participating in a full-scale mock disaster at the Outagamie Regional Airport.  Now you may ask what does this accomplish?  The Airport and Greenville Fire and EMS do this to satisfy FAA regulations as well as prepare us for such a disaster.  You can see that this is a large commitment for volunteers.  Please be proud that Greenville has some of best volunteer firefighters and first responders in the state. 

This is a short synopsis of our department.  We truly stand by our mission of “neighbors helping neighbors.” 

Sincerely,
Chief Rick Romenesko