By Nelsy Rodriguez
The Press Enterprise
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Two of Riverside County’s top firefighters — who also happen to be women will be front and center in an upcoming reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
“Lives on Fire” will premier at 9 p.m., Friday, June 8, on OWN. The series follows four female firefighters as they take on a predominantly male role at work and the traditional role at home.
Diley Greiser, a 42-year-old paramedic who works at a Glen Avon station, and 40-year-old fire apparatus engineer Nica Vasquez, who worked in Wildomar during filming, are featured.
Taping for the show took place over several months last year, said Wildomar Fire Battalion Chief Steven Beach, and the department was given final cut authority over the material. Camera crews followed Greiser and Vasquez 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as they transformed overnight from emergency responders to mothers, sisters and wives.
In separate interviews, both women said they were nervous about the exposure, but couldn’t pass on the opportunity to show women across the country they are capable of being moms and firefighters.
“If you balance your life, you can do something that makes you feel so good,” Greiser said. “I have a career where I set a strong example as a strong woman. You can do it all, you just have to balance it.”
Neither firefighter has seen the first episode that will air this Friday so nerves are still high. But Vasquez said that once she was able to shake off the discomfort of having cameras chronicle her every move, she noticed that the cameras were helping her better connect with her duties.
“I’m a bubble person, I definitely need my space. So to have that camera with me 24/ 7 was surreal,” Vasquez said. “It’s not a natural thing to have a camera around you constantly but it made me realize what was going on around me and I really embraced it.”
Vasquez and Greiser said physical endurance and mental aptitude are fundamental to their jobs. They both workout daily — Vasquez participates in Cross Fit workouts while Greiser prefers the feminine athleticism of Zumba, a high-energy aerobics regime. And each remembers vividly the moment they knew they wanted to be a firefighter.
For Greiser, the moment came soon after her family moved from Cuba to Chicago under political asylum.
Still a child, Greiser said she remembered coming upon a single-vehicle car accident while out with her father. Within minutes, firefighters descended onto the scene and Greiser watched in awe as the “men in jackets and what I thought were the funniest-looking hats ever,” worked tirelessly to save the driver’s life.
“When I looked around the scene I didn’t see a single woman so I thought, because I was a kid and I came from a country where the gender roles are kind of written in stone, that it was never going to be a possibility to be a firefighter,” she said.
Vasquez was born into her inspiration. Her father served as a firefighter, she said, and although she first enrolled in nursing school, she could never shake the sense of belonging inside a fire station. While attending nursing school, Vasquez began volunteering at a fire station in La Qunita.
“I walked in (to the fire house to volunteer) and that was my deciding point,” she said. “I was working toward nursing and I had made that decision, but my heart was always at the fire station. For me, all those memories of sitting with my dad and him telling me the stories was the coolest thing ever.”
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