By Andrew Wellner
Anchorage Daily News
Copyright 2007 Anchorage Daily News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
WASILLA, Alaska — For two summers now, Adam Popiel has been living at the Central Mat-Su Fire Department’s fire station 6-1, the big one in downtown Wasilla,
Popiel is a summer intern, one of two to come to Wasilla in the last three years from Oklahoma State University. In addition to working with the department administrators, he’s an on-call responder, going out to fire and rescue calls during the day and at night.
The OSU School of Fire Protection and Safety Technology, from whence Popiel hails, is also the alma mater of former Central Mat-Su Fire Chief Jack Krill Jr., who started the internship program.
A Pennsylvania native from just outside Philadelphia and soon-to-be college graduate, Popiel sat down Wednesday at the station to talk about his summer and what keeps bringing him back to Wasilla.
Q. How did you end up coming to Alaska?
A. I was working at environmental health and safety at OSU and one of my fellow co-workers had been an intern up here the previous year and it sounded like a pretty good deal.
We come up here, we get the experience of some of the administrative duties ... but we also get to go out to fires, we live for free at the station -- it’s an all-around good deal. So as soon as the opportunity came up for the internship, I applied.
Q. Did you apply to just this one?
A. No, I applied for this one and I applied for Hilton Head Island (S.C.), which was a similar program, obviously on the other side of the country, but it was a little bit closer to home.
But their program is, I guess, a little bit more strict. Pretty much you’re in the office 9 to 5 and you can do ride-alongs after hours. Here you’re actually an emergency responder throughout the day and at night, so your fire response is intermixed with your job duties.
Q. So were you responding like right off the bat?
A. It took about a week. It’s kind of an acclimation period. You get to know where all the stations were, the (standard operating procedures). I got gear on my second day and started tagging along. It was more of a ride-along in the beginning.
Q. And then, after one summer you just decided to come back, you liked it so much?
A. It was a great summer last summer and I had never been to Alaska. And it’s a great group of people here to work with and I went out on a bunch of calls, some interesting ones. I did a bunch of wildland stuff I (would’ve) never got to do ... back home, I’m from Pennsylvania, originally, and we don’t have um ...
Q. Wildland fires?
A. Yeah, it just doesn’t happen. It’s damp enough up there and there’s so much development there’s not as much open space.
Q. So this isn’t the first time you’ve been on a fire department?
A. No. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter since February of 2000. I started out at one department in Pennsylvania and then when I finished my freshman year in college for broadcast communications I moved back home and joined another department back there.
And then, when I went to OSU, I applied for a rural fire protection district out there.
This is my last year I’m working on my fire protection and engineering degree.
I started taking classes at Delaware Tech and they have an associate’s in fire protection and engineering. From that program I transferred to OSU.
Q. What do you like about this department?
A. It certainly gives me a well-rounded experience, and this is a unique opportunity for me because I’ve never worked with a paid on-call volunteer system, which is kind of a combination system where you’re not really paid but you are.
And there’s a lot of departments back in Pennsylvania who are struggling with the volunteer system because they’re running too many calls to support it totally volunteer, so they have some personnel that are full-time paid, so this is a unique way to do it. It’s really good to see it work the way it does.
Q. Is it noisy here? Is it tough to sleep at a fire station?
A. I don’t have trouble sleeping anywhere. I sleep like a rock.
Waking up for calls, that’s where I’ve had trouble. Once or twice I have had to have somebody say, ‘Are you coming?’
‘What? Oh, yeah, a call.’
Q. Are there actual rooms for you to stay in here?
A. They’re single beds and then individual lockers.
The way the one bunk room is set up is there’s a large room and then it kind of wraps around the corner. They put me back in the corner. There’s a little bit of privacy back there.
Q. What other stuff are you doing now?
A. There’s all sorts of projects right now. I’m working on a review of our standard operating procedures, which ... need to be updated.
Right now we’re having (devices) installed throughout town here ... that will change the (traffic) light green for the fire engine, keep everyone else red.
Little by little the state’s putting them in, so I’m coordinating with the state.
Q. Are there any out there now?
A. The only one that’s installed and operating right now is at Fishhook and Seldon.
Q. What do you do when you’re not working?
A. I went up to Denali this past weekend. I didn’t get up there last summer, so I definitely wanted to get up there this summer. So I took a camping trip up there. Went rafting.
Q. Did you do any fun Alaska stuff last year?
A. Yes. We did go fishing and clamming in Seward and Ninilchik.
Q. With folks from around here?
A. Yeah, folks from the department. You get to get away from the station for a day or two, decompress.
Q. Do you have a car up here?
A. I do, I actually drove up last year and this year.
This year I just went straight up from Oklahoma and took the Alcan.
Q. Have you been out on any really big fires up here?
A. We had the Su Valley High School fire and then the (Big Su) fire. We’ve had a couple other fires around here, just single-family dwellings.
Q. Would you come back to Alaska?
A. I think I’d come back. But I’ve never spent a winter up here.
But Pennsylvania isn’t so warm in the winter ... We have our 2-foot blizzards but they’re done in a couple days and then the snow starts to melt. Up here it doesn’t melt so much.
Q. Do you get paid?
A. Yeah. We get paid as an hourly employee and make 40 hours a week. It’s a little bit different than the responders. We don’t get paid for calls; we just get paid for the office work.
It’s OK if I have to get up in the middle of the night, I’m paying for room and board.
Q. That’s what you’re doing, just paying your bills.
A. Yep.