When Kevin Nunn accepted the badge of office Monday as the new chief of the Estes Valley Fire Protection District, he chose not to speak first about strategy, budgets, or emergency response.
Instead, he spoke about hope.
Moments after taking the oath of office before firefighters, first responders, community leaders, residents, and elected officials including U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, State Sen. Janice Marshman, Estes Park Mayor Gary Hall, Trustee Bill Brown, Larimer County Sheriff John Feyen, and members of the EVFPD board, who were gathered at the Dannels Fire Station, Nunn reflected on the significance of the chief’s badge that had just been pinned to his uniform.
“The small badge holds enormous weight and represents a bigger element called the future,” he said. “People can be very afraid of the future, of change.”
Nunn said one of the most influential lessons of his career came from a mentor, former Oak Ridge, Tenn., Fire Chief Darryl Kerley.
“When faced with a decision, when given a choice, go with the one that represents the greatest amount of change. In short, there’s no growth in comfort.”
This message framed both his decision to come to Estes Park and now the direction he hopes to lead the district.
“I’m here out of faith and hope,” Nunn said. “Your faith in me is based on what you’ve read, how I interview, how I behave, my history. Your hope that I can lead this organization into the future. Your hope is that that future is bright.”
He then offered a story from his years as a lieutenant on a fire engine in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., to explain what hope sounds like.
Responding to a house fire in the middle of the night, Nunn’s crew was less than a mile from the burning home. Department policy generally prohibited using the siren until reaching a main road to avoid waking nearby residents.
But that night, the engineer told him to activate the truck’s Q-Siren immediately.
At first, Nunn hesitated because it conflicted with department policy. Then he understood.
The family watching their home burn had called 911 but had heard nothing. In the silence of the night, the wail of the approaching fire engine would tell them help was on the way.
“So, I lay it on the Q,” Nunn recalled.
The crew sounded the siren from the moment they left the station until they arrived. After the fire was extinguished, the family told the firefighters something Nunn has never forgotten.
“Their comment to us was the siren was the best thing they’d ever heard,” he said. “It gave them hope and understanding that everything was going to be okay. We were going to get there. We were going to put the fire out.”
For Nunn, the lesson extends well beyond that single emergency.
“As firefighters, that’s what we sell,” he said. “We sell hope.”
He asked the audience to think differently the next time they hear a fire engine racing through Estes Park.
“In the future, when you hear those sirens through town, know that we’re changing people’s lives. We’re changing the future for good,” Nunn said. “There can be a great fear of the future, but with change are great opportunities, great excitement, great visions, faith, hope, sirens. We will all be there together as a community.”
To punctuate his story, Nunn had one of the fire engines that was sitting in the driveway queued up to blast the Q-Siren for a few brief seconds.
Nunn officially became the Estes Valley Fire Protection District’s new fire chief during Monday’s change-of-command and swearing-in ceremony, succeeding Interim Chief Warren Jones, who has led the district since October while the board conducted a nationwide search.
Earlier in the ceremony, Jones reminded those gathered that firefighters are called when people are experiencing some of the worst moments of their lives.
“People don’t call us when they’re having a good day,” Jones said. “They call us when they’re having maybe the worst day of their life. And our job and our responsibility and our commitment is to make that day better.”
Nunn’s remarks echoed that sentiment, defining the fire service not only as emergency response but as a promise to a community that someone is coming.
And sometimes, he suggested, hope arrives before the fire engine ever turns the corner.
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