ESU Students Fight Fires while Tackling Classes

Posted by: admin on February 26, 2015, 3 Comments

fire-700x300
When Acme Hose Co. No. 1 in East Stroudsburg, Pa. gets a fire call in the middle of the night, four pagers go off simultaneously at a house on Grove Street.

Kevin Polansky, Ross Greenwood, Justin Mapes and Devon Chester spring out of bed and throw on their clothes before piling into a car to race to the fire station in a kind of mayhem usually reserved for madcap comedies.

“The whole house goes crazy,” said Chester, a junior from Rock Hill, N.Y. majoring in athletic training.

Greenwood, a junior majoring in criminal justice and sociology from Trappe, Pa., claims the house is a lot like a zoo at that point.

But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Greenwood, Chester, Polansky, a senior from Glenside, Pa., studying hotel, restaurant and tourism management, and Mapes, a junior from Monticello, N.Y. majoring in business management, started volunteering as East Stroudsburg Borough firefighters a little over two years ago. They all belong to fire companies in their hometowns.

“I missed the adrenaline rush,” Mapes said. “There is nothing like it.”

They balance their class schedules while spending 200 to 300 hours annually fighting fires and meeting the demands of being volunteer firefighters.

This year they were joined by David Fritsche, a freshman majoring in criminal justice from Allentown, Pa.

When the firefighters spring out of bed to answer a fire call in the middle of the night, they don’t let it affect their morning class attendance.

“We sacrifice sleep,” Chester said.

Why do they do it? They know the people they are helping could lose a lot more than sleep. On December 8, some of the student firefighters responded to a huge blaze at a house on Broad Street, which displaced seven people.

“Everyone got out but people had to jump off the roof as an escape,” Greenwood said. “When you respond to a fire, and you see those people, you just want to help as much as you can.”

The rest of the 40 active firefighters in the borough department have been very welcoming, according to the ESU students.

“They took us in like a family,” Polansky said.

Most of the active members of the department are permanent borough residents holding full-time jobs so it’s harder for them to get away to respond to calls during the workweek, Greenwood said.

“When we came back from winter break, they said ‘Thank God the college kids are back,’ ” he said.

Acme 2nd Assistant Fire Chief Joe Totero says the ESU students have been a great advantage to the department.

“We run mutual aid a lot with Stroudsburg Fire Department and with the help of these college students we’re getting the job done better, faster and safer,” Totero said. “They definitely know their stuff, and they’re willing to work hard.”

Each of the student firefighters had to go through about 190 hours of training for their hometown fire companies before they were allowed to fight fires, and each must keep up with continuing training.

Mapes hopes to continue his work as a firefighter as a career. Those in the profession told him that furthering his education is key to that.

“To get anywhere as a firefighter in the fire service nowadays you need something more than a high school diploma,” Mapes said.

Greenwood expects to get his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at ESU and then attend Harrisburg Area Community College for an associate degree in fire science in order to become a fire marshal.

Due to the demands of the job and the fact that they share a living space, the student firefighters have become a makeshift fraternity of sorts. The only dues are sweat equity. They enjoy the easy camaraderie of brothers, finishing each other’s sentences and kidding each other unmercifully.

Fritsche hopes to move into the students’ group house next year.

“These are probably the closest friends I have here,” he said.

The borough fire department has been accepting students who are already trained by their hometown departments for about five years, Totero said.

“We treat them like the brothers that they are,” he said. “We are very thankful to have them around.”