POULSBO, Wash. — He is on a one-man mission to help lower the death toll in Ukraine.
Battalion Chief Jake Gillanders is taking the rescue skills he learned as a Poulsbo firefighter to the war-weary cities of Ukraine.
"We're not going to fight Russians," Gillanders said. "We're going to serve civilians who are caught up in the gears of war."
Gillanders is volunteering with Empact Northwest, Kitsap County-based relief agency that provides rescue training and disaster response to countries around the world.
He's going solo to Ukraine to teach emergency crews techniques to rescue people from collapsed buildings.
They are skills that will be put to use immediately.
"Whether it's an earthquake or an explosion, the concepts are the same," Gillanders said. "I'll be training someone for something they know they're going to have to use versus something they may have to use. There are apartment complexes being bombed that are 14, 15 stories tall, beyond the reach of their ladders and they're trying to extricate people from those buildings."
From the firehouse in Poulsbo, Gillanders is headed to the port city of Odessa in Ukraine. It's a city of a million civilians who are getting bombed regularly.
It's a reality not lost on Gillanders.
"You know, there are people in peril, human beings in peril," Gillander said, fighting back tears.
Gillanders is a 24-year firefighting veteran.
He has seen his share of tragedy.
But the nearly 12,000 civilians reported dead by the United Nations, and the more than 35,000 civilians wounded over more than four years of war, hit home with him as a husband and a father.
The suffering seems endless.
"This corner of the world feels like it has been forgotten," Gillanders said. "There are people who have lost sight of what's happening in Ukraine and the risks civilians are facing every single day."
Skills Gillanders learned to fight natural disasters here at home are now being used to fight the man-made disaster in Ukraine.
"We have the ability to reduce the peril they're experiencing, so we have a duty to act," Gillanders said.