By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
WALDPORT – A fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen in order to exist.
There seems to be no shortage of those elements in the seemingly unending feud between Seal Rock Fire District and Waldport-based Central Oregon Coast Fire & Rescue district.
Smoldering tensions were rekindled into a blaze this month after an incendiary email from Seal Rock Fire chief Will Ewing was made public on social media. That triggered a special Central Coast fire board meeting Wednesday to condemn it and call for an investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.
Ewing’s Feb. 1 email was sent to 38 people which included all Seal Rock and East Lincoln County Fire volunteers and paid fire responders. Seal Rock has been working with East Lincoln in a joint volunteer program.
Ewing’s email was sent the day after a contentious Seal Rock board meeting where one board member was accused of colluding with COF&R and its proxies to undermine Seal Rock. He accused Central Coast of continuing to attack Seal Rock and that he would stage a counter attack and “open war.”
“We have taken the hits silently for three years,” Ewing wrote. “Now I am after blood. Like them I have a discrediting plan overtly. The real fun is exposing their financial issues, which are catastrophic.”
Ewing went on to say he would do “everything within my influence to sabotage” COCF&R’s efforts to seek a state grant to buy its main fire station from the city of Waldport.
“They may not even last that long,” Ewing’s email continued. “So, some of our counter attack is open war, some is subversive.”
The email went on to reference the Tet Offensive eroding public support during the Vietnam War and compared a September purging of firefighters in Toledo to Hitler’s “night of the long knifes.”
Although Ewing’s email had been circulating privately, it was made public Sunday by an anonymous source on a Facebook page for the Waldport community. It was also sent by that person to the media, state legislators, the Lincoln County district attorney and sheriff’s offices, other Lincoln County fire agencies including Central Coast and the Oregon Government Ethics Commission. The anonymous post which noted concern for public safety was signed “A Very Distraught and Concerned Citizen.”
A written response to Ewing’s email addressed to the community was read aloud during COCF&R’s special board meeting. It condemned the “reprehensible statements made by Chief Ewing” and said there was no place “in the fire service for this type of hate, cruelty, vengeance and sabotage…”
“It violates the mutual aid and professionalism the public relies on between fire districts for their personal safety and protection of property,” the letter said. “No duty officer of any kind should ever spew this kind of rhetoric about another public entity, elected officials or members of the public.”
It went on to call on the Seal Rock fire board to take immediate action and report to the public what steps would be taken to remedy “the harm this ongoing attitude has done to the community, surrounding fire districts, and individual targets” of Ewing’s email.
When contacted Thursday by YachatsNews, Seal Rock fire board president Karl Kowalski said he had no comment.
Ewing told YachatsNews on Thursday that he wished he had never written the email.
“The only thing that I would say is that it was an internal email that got out of the loop somehow and it was not intended for mass reproduction,” Ewing said. “It was an internal memo I sent to just my own responders.”
The history of bad blood between Central Coast and Seal Rock dates back to 2020 and has been followed by a steady stream of verbal sparring since.
It has its origins in an intergovernmental agreement between the two agencies under a former Seal Rock chief and board that had them sharing personnel and equipment. That eventually led to a campaign to oust most Seal Rock board members, dismiss chief Tom Sakaris and move from a paid staff of four firefighters to a mostly volunteer department – and cancellation of the intergovernmental agreement.
Tensions went even higher when several Seal Rock board members worked with three former Central Coast board members in the spring of 2022 to try to oust COCF&R Chief Jamie Mason from his job. Voters recalled two of those COCF&R board members in June 2022 and its chair resigned in support.
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
To read the COCF&R board’s letter go here
Below is a copy of Seal Rock fire chief Will Ewing’s Feb. 1, 2025 email
