(Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

Unalaska has a new fire chief. Twenty-year department veteran Zac Schasteen will take over the job starting Monday.

He’s been filling in as acting chief since November, when former fire chief Abner Hoage left to take the same job in Ketchikan. 

But Schasteen has been with the department for most of his life, starting as a 16-year-old volunteer fire cadet.

"It’s been my passion since I was a kid," he says. "I’ve always really enjoyed public service. I just like it."

He’s spent time as an EMT, firefighter and police officer. He also served on city council and worked at TelAlaska, before returning to public safety as a senior fire captain two years ago.

Public safety director Jamie Sunderland says they received six internal and external applications for the fire chief post. But after a long stretch of chiefs who only stayed a few years, he says he’s looking forward to having a lifer in the job.

And Schasteen, who's raising a daughter in Unalaska, says he does plan to stay for the long haul.

"This is my home," he says. "This is the department I grew up in."

He’s spent much of his career as a teacher, expanding the department’s CPR classes and EMT trainings. He wants to maintain that focus, in a working town where he says the fire department plays a unique role.

"Fortunately, we don’t have a lot of fires. What we do have a lot of is traumatic calls ... industrial trauma, and a lot of medical calls," he says. "And that’s an area where that CPR and the first aid part will really come into play, is trying to help people before we actually get there."

That’ll mean training new teachers, too -- many of them from the department’s volunteer base. Schasteen says it’s about tripled in recent years, and he hopes it’ll continue to grow.

"I’ve seen people become very interested and then less so, and a lot of that changes with who the chief is at the time and what their mindset is, and really the direction they want to take their department," he says. "I think one of the things that I’m going to bring to the job is that understanding, that this community is unique. This community is not like a lot of other communities in Alaska or our country."

His first project as chief will be to teach every local eighth grader to do hands-only CPR. After that, he wants to check up on the city’s stock of public defibrillators -- and figure out what he wants in a new senior fire captain. That job has not been posted yet.