Episode 155: Firefighter
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time, some of us have two jobs – one that pays us, one that gives us another kind of reward.
In this episode we meet two women who volunteer as firefighters…
“I actually think that being a female is an advantage in some ways, because there are lots of ways of getting things done. It’s not always brute strength which is the best way.”
“I finally turn and I turn down my music, and she goes, you’re a firefighter! And I said, yes ma’am, and she points to her daughters and her daughters are all amped up and I was like, that’s what it’s about.”
Coming up – how a second career helping others can change your life in unexpected ways.
Australia just had a devastating fire season – it began almost a year ago, and escalated badly at the end of 2019. A lot of you will have seen pictures in the news of Australians evacuated from their homes huddled on beaches, of fires raging, and thick smoke that traveled hundreds of miles. More than 30 people died, thousands of homes were lost, millions of animals killed.
Stephanie Looi is one of thousands of volunteers who helped to fight those fires and rescue people trapped in their homes.
“I flew the fires from the north of the state to the southern border, and across a lot of different fires even during a day…so you might start the day in Sydney and end up on the Victorian border pulling people out…”
She’s a volunteer with the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. New South Wales was the state worst hit by the fires and it has the biggest volunteer firefighting service in the world – Stephanie says about 72 thousand volunteers and they cover 95% of the state.
She wants to emphasize that here she is not speaking on behalf of her organization, these are her personal opinions. We spoke over Zoom.
Stephanie has a few different roles in the fire service. Locally, she’s deputy captain of a brigade in her area on the outskirts of Sydney.
“So driving a big red truck under lights and sirens, I’m a response driver for my brigade, and being able to do that, I drive a little hatchback in real life [laughs] so driving a 13 and a half ton truck under lights and sirens is a big stretch for me, and it took me a lot of work to be able to do that.”
And it built a lot of confidence along the way. She also works as part of a remote area firefighting team – they can travel hundreds of miles by air to get to a fire. And she’s a member of a rescue crew…
“So winching out of a helicopter into flood waters onto the roof of a car to pull someone out, or flying in front of a bush fire to pull residents out…they’re all things we’re trained to do and we all do – and it’s pretty incredible to have those sorts of opportunities when in my civilian life I sit at a desk and write stuff.”
Stephanie’s other job – that one that pays her - is in public health. She works from home, sits at a computer, has meetings, online and off. When she’s not working she’s taking her three-year-old daughter to dance class, dispensing snacks, reading bedtime stories. The fire service is a different world.
“Certainly some of the experiences I’ve had, you have to pinch yourself that it’s happened. So in the last fire season we were flying in army helicopters…and here we are screaming down to the Victorian border with the doors off and you’re just like what just happened there, I’m like a middle-aged mum and I’m literally sitting in the door of an army helicopter as we’re screaming off to rescue someone with a whole bunch of army guys…it was interesting!”
AM-T: And it must make you feel really good…
“Yeah it does, when we see disasters I think as humans we want to help – whether it’s coronavirus or big fires or floods or whatever it is, I think as humans we do get an urge not to be helpless in those sorts of situations…so for me it’s a really good feeling to feel like you’re part of the solution. I really like that.”
Women are still a minority in the New South Wales Rural Fire Service – as they are in most fire services. But their numbers are growing.
“So when I joined there weren’t that many of us, I certainly would be the only female on the truck or go to a fire and there’d be 100 firefighters there and you’d be the only woman. But in the last ten years there are a lot more women in the service, so in my brigade we can turn out an entire truck of women these days including an officer and a driver, which is pretty cool. And we do see a lot more women in the service. But it’s not all roses, there are still lots and lots of issues we need to address to make it really equal.”
She says take the structural stuff. The fire service is hierarchical and even though almost a quarter of the service is now women, she says still only five percent of the top roles are held by women – and she says the way things work in the service makes it hard for mothers like her to give as much time to it as they used to. And that in turn affects who gets to rise up the ranks.
“It’s hard in terms of if you want to do courses that allow you to fulfill more roles or get that rank promotion, they go on in the evenings, weeknights, and kids have sports, they need to be put to bed…that kind of thing. And it becomes an issue. And how we treat women who are pregnant in the service, because when you’re firefighting you can be exposed to different toxins, and how that works when you’re pregnant - it’s easy to say, ‘you’re a volunteer, don’t turn up,’ but the brigades are a lot of your social structures and support networks, so by saying don’t turn up all of a sudden you’ve taken the support structures and support networks away from a woman at a time when they actually really need them.”
AMT: I’m curious though, your husband, would he accommodate, just as an example, you being gone in the evening to do training classes or whatever …
“He does. I’m lucky. He’s amazing. Not just the training classes, he’s just lived through the fire season like I have. He’s picked up the bulk of the caregiving – daycare pickups, drop-offs, putting her to bed, explaining why Mummy’s not there again, and just giving extra hugs because I’m away, right, I am lucky because I have that support but not all women have that I suppose, and I think if we look in society it is traditionally the man that’s been able to go out and do stuff while the woman has been at home. I still believe that it needs to be more equal across the board – looking at things like how much day care costs, looking at daycare outside traditional hours or short term daycare, how society allows women to get around those sorts of things.”
AM-T: You’ve made me think…Do you think there’s an advantage to being a woman in this role? Are you able to do things that men can’t? I know people think well men this physical strength and women lack that strength and that may be true, but maybe there are other ways people aren’t even thinking about in which women particularly shine…”
“Absolutely. So particularly in my rescue crewy role I actually think that being a female is an advantage in some ways, because there are a lot of ways of getting things done, and it’s not always brute strength which is the best way.”
As Stephanie mentioned before, one of the things her rescue team does is help drivers stranded by floods. The recent fire season finally ended with the heaviest rains in years.
“Cars are really tricky things because in water they’re really unstable, if you move your weight the wrong way or the victim moves their weight the wrong way all of a sudden that car can be swept downstream or you tip and roll and you lose everyone off it, so you’ve got to be pretty careful how you move people around particularly if you’re trying to get people out of the driver’s seat onto the roof so you can get them out. Because of that we tend to be pretty directive with people I suppose when we’re trying to move them around the car. You’ll get in their face, you’ll do a bit of yelling, you’ll physically pull that person across because you want them to do exactly what you need them to do at that time.
So one of my colleagues has winched out of this helicopter onto the roof of the car, she’s a mum, two kids, and I’m listening along on a headset expecting to hear a bit of yelling and instead of that what I hear is this, ‘OK, love, righty-o now, you scooch your bottom over, OK, we can do this, arms up sweetheart!’ And it was hilarious, it was the funniest thing ever – she just chucked her best mum voice on and that victim just did exactly what she wanted. But what it did was it really de-escalated a situation that can be really, really stressful and I think the other part is she managed to stay authentic to who she was, which I think is really nice. She went, ‘I’m not a yelling person, I don’t need to do that to achieve this outcome,’ so in that sort of case I think her way was actually better.”
And she says in the case of a wildfire, when you land at someone’s farm and tell them they need to come with you right now – they know they’re likely to lose their home, livestock, and pets to that fire…
“And that’s a really tough decision for someone to make, and I think that a little bit of compassion, a little empathy and sometimes a hug or two can help sit that decision easier on someone’s shoulders as they’ve left. And I’m not saying men don’t display compassion and empathy because they absolutely do, but what I am saying is that they’re not terms we often use when we talk about firefighting and I think that we should…because it’s not all about the brave firemen striding through the smoke to throw the damsel in distress over his shoulder and stride off into the sunset. There are lots of skills that make a good firefighter and if you think about strength and fitness, well twelve weeks with a PT will probably fix that, but if you have the wrong attitude or if you don’t have empathy or you don’t work well in a team, well 12 weeks at a coach isn’t going to fix that. So the easiest thing to fix is your fitness so I don’t necessarily see why we get so hung up on it.”
She’s been doing this for ten years now and this past fire season seemed endless. And there are those improvements she’d like to see to make things easier for women in the service.
AM-T: ‘Cause you mentioned the structural issues, and your little girl is at an age where she needs tons of attention…do you want to continue in the service?
“I do, yeah. Like I said before, I think when you see bad stuff happen you want to be part of the solution. Also my child’s an only child so I think it’s good for her to understand that sometimes other people need me more than she needs me right now. I think being an only child sometimes it’s easy to assume you’re the center of someone’s world, and actually she is the center of my world, but sometimes other people need me so right then I have to go, or I’m not at home to kiss you goodnight, or the pager’s gone off and actually you need to go somewhere or be dropped with Grandma or something like that.”
And she thinks her role with the fire service makes her a better parent. Being with people who have lost everything to a fire – it’s helped keep Stephanie focused on what’s important: her husband and child. She says stuff? She could leave it behind in a heartbeat. And she knows a three-year-old’s meltdown in the supermarket is pretty minor in the scheme of things.
AM-T: How do you feel after the recent fire season, were you just exhausted?
“It’s kind of funny because we went straight from there pretty much into Coronavirus-land. It’s all a bit crazy really. It was exhausting and intense and I did things you abstractly train for but I never thought you’d have to do. So we’d fly into a valley, go ‘oh, there are 15 properties here, we have time to land in one, which one will it be?’ And I remember sitting in that training thinking oh my God, how am I ever going to do that, or how could I make that decision, also how could I live with myself after having to make that decision? And after doing it a few times you realize those decisions are actually really easy and it’s quite easy to live with yourself afterwards, you say ‘we made the best decision we could with the information we had,’ and you move on, so in some ways it was a really positive thing to be able to say actually, I know that my training works.”
Kassie Stevens grew up in the northern hemisphere on the other side of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, California. She got interested in fire at a very young age. The hills around her house would burn every few years. Kassie’s 35 now. But once, when she was about six, her dad took her to get a closer look at an approaching fire…
“I have this memory that’s burned…it’s got its own little ripple in my brain, and it’s the fire coming over the hill and it looks like a spider…because the heat and the waves and the fire, it looked like spider legs crawling up the side of the hill.”
She remembers being mesmerized – scared, but also excited.
“There’s just something about the smell, the color of the sky, and how everything kind of takes over. It was just so beautiful, it’s still clear in my head.”
Kassie’s dad had been in the navy, then he became a police officer. Her mom was a medical transcriptionist. Community service was an idea she grew up with. And she admired firefighters from afar. But despite her longtime interest, she didn’t pursue it once she left high school, tried college, and then dropped out.
“I was still so ignorant, like we all are at 18 years old, I had no confidence in myself, I didn’t think I’d be capable of doing any of the things…I would drive past fire stations and be like man, I bet you that’s awesome, that’s a ton of fun, but I bet you it’s hard, I don’t know if I can do it, I didn’t have the confidence in myself, and Shaun really helped, pushed to get me going there and joining the fire service and being good and comfortable in it.”
So let me backtrack for a minute here. Back in January I got an email one day from a guy in Oklahoma – his name is Shaun Pryor. He said, you know, ‘you should really talk to my fiancée for your show – she’s a firefighter – it’s a world riddled with stereotypes and expectations. And she has some stories to tell.’
I’d never got an email like that before.
Shaun: “I thought, you know what, I’m proud of her, I’m proud of what she does, I’m proud of how hard she works, and as my grandmother used to say, closed mouths don’t get fed, so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
Shaun and Kassie met about five years ago. Kassie had left California years before, married young, and eventually settled in Oklahoma. She ended up getting divorced…and she met Shaun and his son, Riley, who lived with Shaun fulltime. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
“Being his stepmom, being his mom, has been the best thing that has ever happened to me, next to meeting Shaun. Riley gave me something that I couldn’t do on my own, so – sorry, I’m getting emotional – so that’s really special to me.”
She says Shaun has always been giving and helpful to those around him, and he joined a nearby fire department before she did, right around the time a wildfire raged in Oklahoma for weeks.
“He got in and it was like a drug, and it was all fire department, all the time, if he had spare time, he was there at the fire station. So he really pushed my want for it and made me feel like I could do it.”
Kassie’s regular job is in property management - she runs a 300-unit apartment complex. And she feels like she’s good at it, but she says she knew there had to be more to life than going to work and having people complain to her about their toilets. She longed to do something more – to serve her community the way her parents had when she was growing up, the way Shaun was now. Finally, his encouragement paid off, and she joined.
“Normal week for me is get up, go to work, deal with people’s apartments flooding, people being mad, then go to the gym then on Thursdays, come home, get changed, get in the truck, be at the station all night, stay till midnight, come back, go to sleep, go to work next day, then go to the station on the weekend for training or for any other calls that come in during that time or during the week.”
A lot of the work is responding to medical emergencies and helping out before the paramedics get there. She says this year’s been a quiet fire season, though others have not.
And right now it’s Kassie’s day job that’s supporting everyone. When I was first emailing with them both, Shaun worked as a warehouse manager for a company that makes safety gear for people working in the nearby oilfield – Oklahoma is a big oil producing state. But as Kassie told me during our interview…
“So when Covid happened and the price of oil dropped, Shaun has actually been unemployed. He was let go the first week back on March 13th.
AM-T: Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that.
“It’s OK, it’s OK. It was really scary at first but it’s actually worked out really well. Riley our son is not in school, he gets to be home with dad all day, they get to spend a lot of time together which they don’t normally get to because of the fire service. Riley is getting home-schooled, so it’s actually been beneficial for our family.”
Shaun has scaled back from the fire service a bit while Kassie has taken on more. And there are challenges that come with the role.
For background – Kassie and Shaun are a mixed-race couple, she’s white, he’s African-American, and the fire department they serve is in a traditionally black community. She says she’s had someone outright tell her a white woman shouldn’t be doing her job in their community, and there was the firefighter who said he wouldn’t want to work with her for that same reason.
And Kassie says in a rural area in a conservative state, people aren’t always thrilled to see a woman turn up in answer to a call. And at times her department has been largely made up of female volunteers.
“This expectation that if you call, these big burly men are gonna show up…that’s what everyone expects…but when you have a call and three women roll up at your house everyone tilts their head , people don’t know how to react to it, or you get the people who say don’t touch me, I don’t want you here, they want to shove you out the door, they want nothing to do with you because you’re a woman – now I don’t know if this is a nationwide issue or just dealing with a small community…I don’t know. But even just at work, no joke, 3 days ago, I was talking to my electrician and I had my water bottle and duffel bag and had changed over and I was getting ready to get in the truck and head to the station, and he was like, where are you going? And I said I’m heading to the station, and he said what station, and I said the fire house, and he goes, why? And I said because I’m a firefighter, and he said, no you’re not. And it’s just like no, I just figured I’d say that for funsies…and it happens so often, it’s constant.”
It really bugs her. But she loves the work – she loves helping the people who place those calls. As in so many rural areas, younger people in their area tend to head to the cities for jobs, so there’s a real need for volunteers like Kassie. And she says there are other benefits – like the ability to change minds.
“I would say my most favorite moment, I don’t know why I’m so emotional today, geez Louise…so when Shaun and I first met, Riley used to say, girls can’t do anything, girls can’t do this, girls can’t do that – and I’ve made it my mission to prove to him girls can do anything because that’s so important to me, there are so many women out there who think they can’t do it…and it’s so frustrating to me. It doesn’t matter if you have lady parts, get out there and do it, and I hate, hate, hate men out there who think just because you’re a woman you can’t do it. I wanted to make sure my son could grow up and he wasn’t going to be one of those men, that he didn’t think women couldn’t be firefighters, he didn’t think women couldn’t be police officers, didn’t think women could join the military and be a fighting force – I wanted my son to not be one of those men.”
Shaun: “You know the sad part is I don’t know where he got that from because I can say I didn’t teach him that, but he did not believe women could do half of the things, it shocked me, I’m like, Dude, man, I’ve been a bad dad, but yeah, she’s been an inspiration, like there’s nothing, mostly, women can’t do, like I tell Kassie, I don’t see you benching 500 pounds but other than that there’s nothing she can’t do and it’s been great for him, it’s been really good.”
Kassie wants to be an inspiration outside the home too. She was in Walmart once, still in her uniform, and she notices this little girl just starting at her…
“It dawned on me she’s never seen a female firefighter, and she was all smiles. The other day I was in my truck driving home, in gear, I had my window down, it was the first beautiful day we’ve had in, gosh, weeks! I’m listening to my music, I’ve got the windows down the sunroof up, and this woman just keeps pointing at me, and I’m like, what is she doing? She’s looking at her little girls in the back seat, and she’s pointing at me, looking back and I finally turn down my music and I’m like, what’s up? And she goes, you’re a firefighter, and I said, yes ma’am, and she points to her daughters and her daughters are all amped up and I was like, that’s what it’s about.”
She loves those moments when young girls can see something in her that might encourage them – she says changing their minds about what they’re capable of…it’s one of the best aspects of this role.
She’d recommend this kind of work to anyone.
“I feel like everybody needs to have that moment in their life where something that they did, not something your kid did, something you did, made you so proud, it made your chest tight. And that’s that pride that comes from serving your community, from helping people when they need it.”
And that won’t always mean rescuing people from a fire, or a car wreck. It might just be helping an older person off the floor of their kitchen when they’ve fallen, and can’t get up.
“At the end of the day we know we’re there to make a difference, whether anyone sees it or not, that’s not what’s important, it’s like opening the door to someone, you don’t open the door to someone because you want them to say thank you, you open the door to someone because you’re doing what’s right.”
So if you’ve ever cast a curious eye at your local fire house…
“It’s a great place to be, I would encourage any woman who’s out there considering it, call your local volunteer fire department and see if they need anyone, see if they’re doing a recruit class, or see if you can just come down for a day and hang out – you just have to make that one phone call, show up, that’s all it takes.”
Kassie Stevens in Oklahoma. Kassie actually has 3 jobs – as well as managing the apartment complex and being a volunteer firefighter she restores furniture on the weekends.
Thanks to Kassie and Shaun and Stephanie Looi for being my guests on this show.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’ll post some photos of my guests under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.