There were two other nominees for Firefighter of the Year.

Stephanie Allestad is a longtime volunteer from Fire District 8 on the North Beach. She is involved in certification training for the district and also is the organizer of the annual Ocean Shores Chocolate on the Beach festival. Allestad has been with the department since 2006 and is currently the community liaison for the district.

“I facilitate a lot of the trainings and meetings and attend meetings with the county and North Beach area,” she said. “I work with fire and law enforcement in the county, and on the scene I handle crowd control and traffic, and work with the families and law enforcement so the EMTs can do their job.”

In the past she has also worked with the Red Cross and Grays Harbor Volunteer Search and Rescue. For the past 10 years she has helmed the annual Chocolate on the Beach festival. “It started off as a fundraiser for the Museum of the North Beach, and it kept getting bigger and bigger,” she said. “In the fifth year we became our own entity, and we’ve donated more than $26,000 back into the North Beach community.”

Matt Miller with the Hoquiam Fire Department was also nominated.

“Matt Miller is one of our headquarters captains, and he is in charge of all our training for the department,” said Hoquiam Fire Chief Paul Dean. “He’s also in charge of all of our probationary training for new firefighters.”

Hoquiam is a fairly large department, making the training job particularly time consuming and complicated.

“It’s a big chore,” said Dean. “We have 21 personnel here that require a certain number of hours of training on pieces of equipment and other vehicles throughout the year, and he supervises all that training, coordinates it and keeps track of it all. It’s a big chore and he does a great job.”

Miller just hit the 18-year mark with the Hoquiam Fire Department, having come on board in March 1999.