Teens in training are ‘jacks-of-all-trades’
Copyright 2005 The Hartford Courant Company
By MICHAEL KONCEWICZ
Courant Staff Writer
Hartford Courant (Connecticut)
SIMSBURY, Conn. - It’s a routine fire cadet story -- getting to high school a little late after a sleepless night responding to car crashes, fires and everything else that might require the town volunteer firefighters’ help.
Chris Mathiason, one of 15 cadets with the Simsbury Volunteer Fire Department, had a night like that last winter.
He was up at 2 a.m. responding to a crash. At 7 a.m., he went on another accident call. So his father drove him straight from the scene to high school. He missed the 7:40 a.m. start. The 16-year-old junior could barely stay awake all day.
But the occasional tough night doesn’t dampen the cadets’ enthusiasm for the program, started in 1978 to give teens 15 to 17 a taste of the firefighters’ life -- and maybe prompt them to join as volunteers when they turn 18.
“They’re a jack-of-all-trades,” said Rich Driscoll, a Simsbury volunteer fire captain who advises the cadets. The junior firefighters meet one night a week, usually at a fire station, for training. They make time in their schedules of part-time work and after-school activities for the weekly sessions.
Cadets go out on calls, working with the regular firefighters as a support team -- getting equipment, unrolling and rolling hoses and other duties. But they don’t enter burning buildings.
“They’re stepping into some big shoes,” said Driscoll of the cadets.
Mathiason’s experience is typical. He’s been on fire calls and accidents -- even some events that killed people he knew. At accident scenes, he often helps paramedics carry stretchers into ambulances.
“It’s sad, but at the same I get to help people. I’ve been exposed to that since I was 5,” said Mathiason, whose father Leonard Mathiason is second assistant chief of the town’s fire department.
The younger Mathiason doesn’t dread getting a call. Actually, he’s frustrated by the limitations of being a junior firefighter, including not being able to respond to fires during school hours.
“I’ve heard there’s real fires going on, and I get pretty frustrated,” Mathiason said.
The program gives cadets a stronger tie to the community than most people their age might have.
Before Kyle Testerman became a junior firefighter four months ago, he’d been thinking there wasn’t much in the town to keep him after graduation.
Testerman has changed his view of the town because of the program.
“It draws me in, it makes me want to stay,” he said.
It’s the same for other cadets.
“You build a lot of relationships with the people you meet,” said cadet Christina Adamczyk, 17.
Petra Weisbrich, also 17 and a cadet, said the department becomes “like a family” to the cadets who really train and take part.
Driscoll said many cadets end up staying on with the department.
“Both the first and second members of that first group are still with department today,” said Driscoll, who quickly named seven or eight other former junior firefighters still with the department.
Once the cadets have a few years’ experience with the department, it’s a natural move for them to become involved in the department in some capacity. “They’re like sponges, once you reach 18, you don’t throw it all out the window,” said Driscoll, a junior firefighter himself in the 1980s.
The program turns out well-trained firefighters. The proof is the town’s junior firefighter team’s top ranking this fall in the annual statewide Explorer and Junior Firefighter Muster and Challenge.
Simsbury cadets have been the top team every year since the muster began in 2001. This year’s event on Oct. 23 at the Connecticut Fire Academy in Windsor Locks had 14 competing junior teams.
“We trained really hard. We work really well together,” Maggie Boudreau, 17, said of the team’s success. “I don’t think we could do any of this without our advisers.”
Driscoll said the Simsbury team works well together because the teens trust each other.
“We don’t train to win; we train to become better firefighters,” said Mathiason.
Monday nights are training nights. Cadets switch between classroom lectures and working with the actual equipment.
“You’ve got to be dedicated to do this,” Fire Chief James Baldis said of the program’s success. “Ours is one of the longest-running programs in the area.”
Along with the hours of training, some of the cadets admitted the program also let them do some fun things.
“I like riding in the truck and using the sirens,” Testerman said.
It fulfills childhood dreams that many cadets confess they had of firefighting.
“You grow up watching it. You see them going down the street,” Mark Sperandio, 16, said about childhood memories of the town’s fire department.
Sperandio said as a little boy, he used to play with a toy fire set all the time.
Other cadets at a recent meeting said they did too. And a few said they still do.