Brett Ferrel named interim Fairfield Fire Chief

FAIRFIELD — Brett Ferrel has been named interim fire chief of the Fairfield Fire Department, and he will assume his new duties on April 1.

Ferrel has been a member of the department since 2000, and became a captain in 2013 before being named assistant chief in 2022. Former Fairfield Fire Chief Scott Vaughan stepped down from his position in March 2022, and he was replaced by interim fire chief Lyle Hannes, who has served in that role for the past year. With Ferrel taking the reins as fire chief, Hannes will become the assistant fire chief.

Ferrel said he learned a lot from Vaughan during their time together.

“Scott was an excellent firefighter, and that transferred over to when he was an officer and moved into the fire chief role,” Ferrel said. “He could relay that knowledge to the guys. Lyle and I want to carry out that tradition of making sure the guys have the right information about what to do.”

Ferrel said his new role as fire chief will be part-time, and allow him to continue his full-time job as Jefferson County Emergency Management Coordinator, a position he has held for the past eight years.

Ferrel was born and raised in Fairfield, and graduated from Fairfield High School in 1986. He attended Iowa Wesleyan College, and worked in manufacturing. He said he decided to join the fire department because he had friends who were firefighters, and they told him the department was hiring. Ferrel applied and was accepted.

After Ferrel got some experience as a firefighter, he was promoted to training officer, a post he held for four or five years. He also became the department’s grant writer, responsible for submitting funding requests for fire equipment such as new trucks or air packs.

Ferrel said that Fairfield’s fire chief has historically been a part-time role, and was only converted into a full-time job for Scott Vaughan because he was also the city’s code enforcement officer. Since Vaughan left, the Fairfield City Council decided to make the fire chief a part-time role again, and to hire a full-time code enforcement officer.

In his position as Jefferson County Emergency Management Coordinator, Ferrel works closely with first responders in the county. In fact, he said he probably works more with fire departments than any other agency. That involves working with the five fire departments paged from Jefferson County: Fairfield, Lockridge, Libertyville, Batavia and Packwood.

In his 23 years as a firefighter, Ferrel said a couple of fires stand out for their size and ferocity, such as the 2004 fire that destroyed a building on the south side of the square, and the Depot fire in 2011 that required mutual aid from several surrounding departments. Luckily, neither of those two fires caused injury.

“In 23 years, there were probably two instances where we had to rescue someone from a building with a ladder or other means,” Ferrel said.

The city of Fairfield is planning to build a new fire station on West Briggs Avenue, with construction expected to start later this year. Ferrel said the firefighters are excited to move into a big, new building.

“We’ve definitely outgrown this station, and I look forward to the challenges of the new station,” he said. “It will be a lot of work to move everything in there. When you’ve been at it this long, you know where everything is in the station. This will be a benefit not only to the firefighters, but to the residents of Jefferson County and Fairfield.”

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com