Los Alamos Fire Chief Wendy Servey Retires After 19 Years of Service

Wendy Servey closed out her final shift at the Los Alamos Fire Department the same way she spent much of her career: at Station 4 on Diamond Drive. On Friday, March 27, a retirement parade carried her back to the station where she had reported for duty as a probationary firefighter in 2006, completing a full circle that included becoming the first woman in Los Alamos County history to hold the rank of Deputy Fire Chief.

The night before, colleagues, family members and elected officials gathered in Council Chambers at the Municipal Building to mark nearly two decades of service that took Servey from a first-year firefighter on the 4B Shift to the top command post in LAFD. "I was on the 4B Shift then, with Justin Grider, Scott Lucido, Brian Martinez, Jeff Wetteland and Jerry Adair," Servey said of where she began. As for retirement itself, she kept her plans brief: her intention is to have "no plan."

Servey's rise through the department was historic at multiple turns. She became LAFD's first female Battalion Chief in 2014 and later its first female Deputy Chief. The County Council unanimously affirmed her appointment as Fire Chief on May 6, 2025, capping a career that grew through operational leadership, emergency medical services oversight and public safety coordination with Los Alamos National Laboratory and regional partners.

Her successor is already in place. The County Council unanimously confirmed Erik Litzenberg as the new fire chief on December 16, 2025, following a nationwide search that began that fall. Litzenberg, who brings more than 28 years of experience and serves as chair of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group Executive Board, joined the department on January 5, 2026, giving him nearly three months of overlap with Servey before she stepped away.

Litzenberg has been direct about the stakes of the job. Los Alamos, he has said, sits at "one of the worst urban interface areas" in the region, a designation that makes wildfire preparedness as pressing as day-to-day emergency response. That work continues immediately: LAFD has Wildfire Day outreach scheduled for early April, one of several public-facing preparedness events on the spring calendar.

What changes with Servey's departure is a question of institutional momentum. She oversaw EMS coordination, wildfire readiness programs and LAFD's relationship with LANL during a period when the department, one of the largest career fire departments in northern New Mexico, was also managing a strained staffing pipeline. In 2023 the department sought to recruit more than 20 firefighters to fill anticipated vacancies, warning that 20 to 30 percent of its personnel would be eligible to retire in the years ahead.

Litzenberg now takes that challenge forward, with Servey's 19 years of institutional groundwork as the foundation.