By Noel K. Gallagher
Portland Press Herald
Copyright 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Step in to Jon Chamblee’s home office and you’ll see a simple desk, weighted down with more than a half-dozen scanners, a couple of computers and a tangle of wires and power strips as intimidating as a Gordian knot.
Even as you take in the equipment, ranging from 1950s radio scanners to the most up-to-date digital technology, the noise washes over you. Dispatchers bark out numeric fire and police codes in overlapping voices, some faint and fuzzy, others calling out like they are standing right there in the doorway.
“That’s Boston there,” Chamblee says, before turning down the volume on a few scanners so he can hold a conversation. “I know by who’s talking where it’s coming from.”
The retired North Berwick fire chief spends most of his day in here, clearly in his element as he monitors official fire channels from Vermont to Bangor and relays the information to fellow fire buffs in the Southern Maine Fire Notification Association. Chamblee has been president of the group since 2002, he said.
Chamblee is one of more than 100 members of the association, founded in 1992 and the operator of three repeater stations that re-transmit signals from the top of Mt. Agamenticus in York, Mt. Teneriff in Milton, N.H., and on Ossipee Hill in Waterboro. The group’s members are the equivalent of tornado chasers in the Midwest. Many are current or retired firefighters who spend their spare time following regional fire news.
Members like Chamblee monitor the various official fire channels that squawk out bare-bones details on a fire or accident, then relay the information to pager systems and to fellow members on private radio channels. Association members often go out to working fires, where they take pictures for the group’s Web site () or file reports from the field on what’s happening on the ground.
“It’s like a calling,” said member Mike Hinds, a firefighter with Alfred Fire & Rescue who makes a point of going to as many fires as he can. On Saturday, he was taking pictures at a four-alarm fire that gutted a downtown commercial building in Biddeford. Every so often he’d get a call and relay information about the fire to people checking in with him to get updates, common among members of the group.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire ... and there’s me,” Hinds said with a laugh. He said his colleagues nicknamed him “Hinds-omatic” for his constant presence at fires. The Biddeford fire was his 226th of the year.
“I go to at least over 200 fires a year,” he said.
It got started when he was a boy and his uncle, a firefighter, would take him to fires. He took his first pictures at a 1969 fire when he was just 9 years old, and he’s been taking pictures ever since, said Hinds, now 46.
“I love it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said.
Chamblee said on-site reports like the ones from Hinds are a key element to the group’s success in drawing and keeping members.
“They’ll report what they see and the members wouldn’t hear about it if they were listening to the (official) scanner,” Chamblee said. “We’ll say, ‘Oh, the fire is going through the roof,’ or something. ... It’s fun to hear more than what is normal.”
His small office in his home is a virtual fire response nerve center, with a large antenna in the side yard picking up emergency radio traffic from Penobscot County in Maine to Rutland County in Vermont. Scanners hang from shelving and are stacked three-deep on the desktop, bracketed by computers and a few microphones for transmitting.
On the walls, next to photos of Chamblee at work and commemorative plaques for his fire department service, hang papers peppered with scanner codes and fire station data.
Not that Chamblee needs to check the codes very often. A lifetime of working fires has him perfectly attuned to the details of the busy babbling of the dispatchers.
Anyone with a scanner can tune in to listen - the association is on 464.850 frequency - but only members, who pay from $35 to $55 a year, can talk on the channel.
“It’s not a chit-chat type of thing,” said member Jeff Rowe, the assistant fire chief in Sanford. “They listen to these working fires, and sometimes they go out to watch. They have a good relationship with the fire departments.”
So good, in fact, that local fire officials come to their meetings or host association meetings at fire departments or command centers. Last fall, the York County Emergency Management Agency asked the group for volunteers to help out in the emergency operations center in Alfred or at their new mobile command van during a big event.
Still, Rowe said he sometimes gets some guff at work for belonging to the association: “From the professional side of it, a lot of the guys jab me about belonging because it’s a buffs group. But it’s a learning thing for me.”
Rowe joined up just to get access to the wide range of fire calls. Now he goes out to a couple of fires a month during his off hours to see how other fire departments operate.
“I use these other folks’ fires as a learning environment,” Rowe said. “It’s my classroom. I get to see how they handle different situations.”
The fire association was started by a York firefighter named Dave Hilton, who passed away a few years ago. He was just 12 years old when he started showing up at the Mt. Agamenticus fire tower where Chamblee worked at the time as a Maine Forest Service officer. They remained friends over the years, and Chamblee joined the association not long after it got going. He took over as president when Hilton got too busy with other work.
Within the group, there’s a lot of crossover. Most are current or former firefighters, with some coming from a long line of firefighters.
Brian Starkey, former assistant chief for the York Fire Department, was one of the group’s first members. On the bookshelves of his home are more than 300 photo albums filled with pictures from fires, all dated and labeled, some of which he submits to fire buff magazines.
This immersion in all things fire-related is something of a family tradition: His grandfather, father and brother were all firefighters.
Now he thinks of the Southern Maine Fire Notification Association as a bit like a family. “I probably know almost all the members,” he said. “We watch out for each other.”
Chamblee, who retired as chief in 2002, agrees. The best thing about the group - aside from the front-row seat to all the fire news - is the camaraderie, he says.
“I really do enjoy it. It’s fun,” he said. “I’ve met up with a lot of the guys that I knew when I was fire chief.”