By Jessica VanEgeren
The Capital Times
MADISON, Wis. — The shift starts as many do, with an emergency. Yet on this recent summer day, the first one is much less dangerous than what the six-man crew of firefighters is accustomed to handling on a daily basis: The ladder truck has a flat tire.
Before the 24-hour shift comes to an end at 7 a.m. the following morning, the crew will respond to 10 calls, ranging from a fire started by lightning to a caller with breathing problems.
These calls keep the crew on the move at the Madison Fire Department’s station No. 2. Located on Grand Canyon Drive on the city’s west side, it is the second-busiest of the city’s 11 stations. In 2007, the station’s ladder truck responded to 2,495 calls, and the EMS rescue/ambulance responded to 3,141 calls, accounting for more than 5,000 trips in and out of the station that year.
“It definitely takes a different kind of person to do this job,” says Isaiah Goines, who has been a firefighter for eight years. “You have to be up for everything and anything.”
The life of a firefighter isn’t for everybody. The hours alone, 24-hour shifts and 48-hour workweeks, put most at work while others are home with their families. The schedule inevitably leads to missing holiday celebrations, milestones like the first steps of a child and the occasional school recital or youth soccer game, but the pull of the profession, the pull of the fire, is something members of this crew say they can’t live without.
It’s the looming danger when charging a building engulfed in flames, unable to see once they are inside, only able to follow the fire’s location by listening for its hissing and popping sounds, that attracts them to the profession.
“It’s just not a job,” says Lt. Tim Olson, as he sits at the station’s kitchen table drinking black coffee between emergency calls. “There has to be a passion. If there’s not, it shows.”
For some, like Goines, there is a bit of the hero complex involved, too.
“I knew I wanted to do this ever since I was a kid,” says Goines. “And I realized I couldn’t be Batman or Superman.”
For Chris Hammes, one of the station’s two firefighter paramedics, it was a kind gesture shown to him when he was in fourth grade that sparked his interest in the profession. His father had been in a bad accident. An EMS worker, sensing his anxiety, pulled Hammes away from the scene to make sure he was OK.
Greg White’s father became a member of the Madison Fire Department in 1956, the year White was born. Egged on by challenges from his father that he would never make the force, White set out to prove him wrong.
The fact he made the force speaks to his talent and abilities. Getting a job as a firefighter in Madison is no easy task. Competition for openings is fierce, with roughly 1,000 applicants applying for the 12 to 14 new firefighter jobs advertised annually.
“I knew if I didn’t at least try, he would win,” White says.
White has been a firefighter for 24 years. With the typical age of retirement around 53, White, who turns 52 in August, acknowledges he doesn’t have many years left on the force.
“It’s a young person’s job. And I’m glad about that,” he says. “Trust me, you don’t want 60-year-old firefighters coming to rescue you.”
If White is feeling old, it doesn’t show. A little after 2:30 in the afternoon when the fifth call of the day comes into the station, White runs side by side with the others — some 20 years his junior — and jumps into the driver’s seat of the ladder truck.
Olson rides shotgun, a laptop computer nearby to provide his crew with instant updates from dispatch. Firefighters Doug Korducki and Goines buckle up and ride in the back. With the siren sounding, vehicles pull aside as the ladder truck makes its way down Mineral Point Road. The crew is soon called off, though, when firefighters from a station closer to the emergency arrive first.
Before heading back to the station, White drives over to station No. 7 on Gammon Road to fill the ladder truck up with gas, then heads over to Woodman’s. With Goines, the station’s designated chef on board, a few last-minute ingredients are needed before he can start dinner.
Once back at the station, Goines dices tomatoes, green peppers and onions. He cleans and chops chicken for the chicken quesadillas, while jazz music plays softly from a radio hanging near the pots and pans.
“Go ahead and spit on it like you usually do,” Olson says as Goines slides the chicken off a chopping block and onto the flat-top grill.
The comment receives nothing more than a head shake. Hierarchy is evident at any fire station, and this remark came from the top — Olson is the lieutenant in charge of this crew, which will be together for one year until new assignments come out in January.
Nobody knows the chain-of-command reality better than the station rookie, who is regularly reminded of his low-man-on-the-totem-pole status.
With short brown hair, brown eyes and an energetic personality, T.J. McDaniel is the rookie at station No. 2. His length of time with the station: three years.
This puts him in the crosshairs for constant jabs from the other guys, and they are all guys in this case. The Madison Fire Department has 48 women out of a total of 305 firefighters, but none of them works on this crew. Even such things as where McDaniel sleeps and which parts of the station he can spend time in are dictated by his rookie status.
Take the fire station’s TV room. Easily the coziest place in the station with a semi-circle of plush, reclining chairs arranged around a flat-screen TV, it is mostly off-limits to the rookie. After three years with the station, McDaniel has begun only recently to spend time in the room.
“I still don’t spend much time in there,” he says.
McDaniel is bumped from the bedroom designated for the shift firefighter paramedic as well. Because the station has two firefighter paramedics on this shift, the luxury of sleeping in a separate room belongs to Hammes, who has been a paramedic for seven years. Though a firefighter for three years, McDaniel has only been a paramedic for three months.
McDaniel takes such treatment in stride. After all, everyone has been in his shoes at one point in their career. In a way, it’s a rite of passage in this fraternity-like environment.
“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Korducki says. “We’ve all been there.”
As the afternoon hours inch closer to 5 p.m., the smell of dinner cooking begins to draw some of the guys into the kitchen.
The rookie empties the dishwater, while Olson and White relax at the kitchen table. It is a moment of calm before the calls again begin to come in.
“It’s almost like the sun goes down, and the calls come in,” McDaniel says.
Before the shift comes to an end, the crew responds to a call at 9:20 p.m. for someone with breathing difficulty, a call at 1:28 a.m. for a malfunctioning heat detector that subsequently tripped an alarm at a commercial building and a call at 1:52 a.m. to assist with a fire caused by lightning. The last call comes at 1:59 a.m. from a woman in labor.
“I’ve been at this station since January and slept through the night twice,” Olson says. “On the busiest days I’ve taken 20 calls.”