Cimarron Hills fire chief stepping down
Back when horses pulled firefighting carts, retired equines would disrupt traffic by running toward the sound of any siren that went off.
Outgoing Cimarron Hills Fire Chief William Beahan said it will be hard for him to resist doing the same.
More than three decades after he founded the Cimarron Hills Fire Department, he is retiring at the end of July. Robert Helton actually became the new chief in January 2005, and Beahan has served as district adminis- trator for a transition period.
“It’s just time,” Beahan said. “I’ve left a lot of dinners on the table to go take calls. And now there are new things on the horizon and they need to be done by a younger group.”
The chief came to Colorado while in the Air Force in 1963 and then worked for the nowdisbanded North Suburban Fire Department. He moved to what was then the rural community of Cimarron Hills when Powers Boulevard was a dirt road with a stop sign north of Palmer Park Boulevard.
Beahan worked with the community to start a department in 1972 and became the first paid fire chief for a small community in El Paso County.
“It was his vision that brought safety to this community,” said Robert Lovato, a member of the Cimarron Hills Fire Protection District board.
The initial department of about 15 volunteers received about 100 calls a year and its only truck broke down after a month, Beahan said.
He said an early fire helped show how much the community needed an organized fire department with resources. Six apartment buildings under construction burned and the small department could do nothing to prevent it.
“We started out with nothing,” Beahan said. “Then it just started growing day in and day out. We waited for years to have a Kmart on this side of Powers. I remember getting our first fast food. That was a luxury.”
Cimarron Hills, now a pocket of developed-but-unincorporated land adjacent to the Colorado Springs city limits, it home to about 20,000 people. The department keeps four of its 15 paid firefighters on duty at all times and has about 30 volunteers. The station boasts two engines, a ladder truck and three other vehicles. An administrative and training building also has joined the station.
The modern team takes more than 1,200 calls a year, Beahan said. He has dealt with about 11,000 in his career.
“Cimarron Hills grew up with Chief Beahan,” Lovato said. “He’s a father figure first and foremost.”
Without a police department or local government, the chief was a symbol of authority.
Lovato said he remembers growing up in Cimarron Hills with Beahan rolling down his car window to ask loitering teenagers where they were supposed to be and chewing Lovato out for skateboarding where he shouldn’t.
When Beahan pulled behind a car the driver slowed without a word from the chief, even though he had no authority as a traffic cop, Lovato said.
“He’s so imbedded in the community,” said Helton, who became a volunteer for Cimarron Hills in 1986. “He’s part of the infrastructure like the water system and the electric system.”
Beahan never asks anything he can’t do himself, Lovato said. He recalled that when the chief added maneuvering a truck through a maze backward to the training program, someone bet even Beahan couldn’t do it.
So he did it.
PICNIC FOR THE CHIEF
A farewell picnic is planned for the man who saw much of Cimarron Hills be born and grow up from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the department administration building, 1835 Tuskegee Place.
