For many islanders, the winds that roared across the island last week and knocked out power — and the inconvenience and clean-up that followed the stormy night — might already be mostly forgotten.

But for at least two island households, memories of the night will linger, along with gratitude for the lifesaving assistance they received from Vashon Island Fire & Rescue crews.

Last week, Interim Fire Chief Ben Davidson, joined by Fire Captain Josh Munger and Norm Golden, a division chief of Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority who is now serving as a part-time administrative consultant to the district, sat down to talk about what happened on the night of Monday, Feb. 24, and the pre-dawn hours of the following morning.

Munger, the captain on duty as the storm blew over Vashon, said calls steadily came to VIFR reporting downed trees, electrical wires and other damage.

“We just had to keep moving to the next call,” Munger said. “We’d flag them, contact PSE (Puget Sound Energy), and those calls were stacking.”

But then, at around 3:30 a.m., an even more urgent call came in — a large tree had fallen through the roof of a home, and one of the islanders who lived there was in frail health and needed to be moved to a safer place in the house as quickly and expertly as possible.

Munger and his crew assisted in doing so, before answering the next call: another tree had fallen on the far north end of the island, blocking traffic coming off the first ferry of the morning. With chainsaws and other tools, they set to work to clean up that road hazard.

In the meantime, Chief Davidson had been monitoring the situation at home and jumped in to respond to a call from yet another islander in trouble.

This islander, who lived alone, had a respiratory condition that required the use of oxygen at all times. With the power out, the islander had switched to using a small, battery-powered back-up oxygen concentrator, which was quickly draining.

“I ran into my garage and grabbed my portable generator, and took it to the islander’s house … ran a cord inside and hooked the main oxygen concentrator up again,” Davidson said.

He then stayed with the islander for a little over an hour, he said — talking by flashlight and sharing stories about life on the island, until the crew could get to the house and swap out Davidson’s generator with one belonging to the district. But as Davidson left, he told the islander he’d be back in the morning, to bring more fuel for the generator.

“At 7:30 in the morning, I added more fuel and checked in on her, but she was still sleeping, so then I came back at 10 a.m. and at that point, the power was back on,” he said.

Also that morning, Davidson said, he had received another call from the family of the medically frail islander who VIFR crews had assisted during the night — asking for VIFR’s help again to move the islander to a friend’s house.

“And so we went to their home, and collected the islander’s things, and transported the islander in an aid unit to the friend’s house,” he said.

Davidson said the work he and his crews had done during the storm had been rewarding.

“I mean, that’s why we do this job,” he said. “To be there when people need you — and they sure did need us that night.”

Golden, the district’s consultant from Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority, expressed his admiration for VIFR’s first responders’ work and Davidson’s leadership of the district.

“I can’t tell you how cool it is,” Golden said. “Seriously, a fire chief grabbing his own generator to go on a call? Don’t let anybody steal him away from you guys.”

Reached by phone, the islanders involved in the calls detailed by Davidson, Munger and Golden spoke of their gratitude to VIFR. (Both requested anonymity to protect their privacy about their health conditions.)

“I thought I was prepared because I knew there was a storm coming and I had practiced what I would do,” said the islander who Davidson had assisted with his own generator. “What I didn’t factor into my practice was panic.”

Realizing that power outages were widespread and she would likely run out of oxygen in her smaller, back-up unit, the islander had dialed 9-1-1 — something she had never done before. Within 10 minutes, she said, Davidson was at the door.

“This is a humanitarian story,” she said. “The world is spinning and seems out of control, and yet to have a human-to-human interaction like this that is positive to the max — you just don’t hear about things like that.”

The spouse of the frail islander who needed urgent help in the middle of the night, and then again in the morning, also praised “the clarity and compassion” of the VIFR crews who had assisted them.

“They helped me to take care of the most important person in my life in a time of great crisis,” the islander said. “My heart and gratitude go out to them.”