By Jesse Leavenworth
The Hartford Courant
MANCHESTER, Conn. — In his 34 years as a firefighter and shift commander with the Fire/Rescue/EMS Dept., Battalion Chief Dan Huppe said it’s not the big blazes and accidents that affected him most.
Rather, it’s the gratitude he’s heard after helping an injured kid or a sick elderly person that he’ll remember best, Huppe said on Friday, his last work day.
“You really don’t think much about that,” he said, “and then, next thing you know you’re in a restaurant somewhere and somebody taps you on the shoulder and they say, ‘You were at my house a year ago and you took care of my grandmother; you took care of my son – I never got a chance to thank you.’ ... I guess that’s the juice that keeps you going.”
“He’s been a rock star since he’s been here,” Fire Chief David Billings said at a reception for Huppe at Fire Station 2 on Center Street.
Huppe has spearheaded lifesaving initiatives, taken charge of purchasing new equipment and putting it into service and managed the department’s radios, among other responsibilities, Billings said. Although he’s happy that Huppe gets to decompress, his retirement is “a huge loss” for the department, Billings said.
“He carried a lot more work than average,” the chief said.
Huppe also helped bring a 9 1/2-foot tall steel column from the World Trade Center to Manchester in 2011. Part of the wreckage after the terrorist attacks in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, the 5,200-pound column was installed in the Manchester Firefighters Memorial Garden on Tolland Turnpike, which also includes tablets bearing the names of the 343 city firefighters who died on 9/11.
Huppe, 60, grew up in New Britain and the Unionville section of Farmington, where he became a volunteer firefighter at age 17. He was hired as one of Manchester’s first firefighter/paramedics in 1983 and worked for 16 years at that job. He was promoted to lieutenant and served in that role for two years before becoming a battalion chief.
Huppe and his wife, Christine, have two children. Their son, Tyler, recently completed paramedic training and will apply to the Manchester department in the spring, Dan Huppe said. Daughter Alexa, he said, is a pre-med student at Mount Ida College in Massachusetts.
Among the notable changes he’s seen in the life-saving service is the use of naloxone, the heroin overdose antidote, Huppe said. Twenty years ago, the department might have used the drug once in two years. In the midst of the ongoing opioid abuse crisis, it’s not unusual for medics to use the drug three times a day, Huppe said.
He and his wife have a small farm in Hebron, where Huppe also serves in the town’s volunteer department. Firefighting, Billings said, “is just in his blood.”
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