Moscow Volunteer Firefighters Fired Up UI Students Who Make Up City’s Fire Department Can Take The Heat
Most days, Kelly Tschida, Tami Parkinson and 14 other University of Idaho students are indistinguishable from the scholarly herd toiling about campus.
But about 12 to 15 times a month, they forgo deep thinking for action. They are volunteer firefighters, upholders of a Moscow tradition that goes back to 1949.
That year, says Moscow Fire Chief Phil Gatlin, the Moscow Volunteer Fire Department allowed six UI students to live at the station. It was a way to make sure someone always was on duty to roll the trucks when an alarm sounded.
Since then, the program has grown to 16 students living in the city’s two stations.
Fire companies comprised of college students are not rare. Washington State University has one, and Spokane County Fire District 8 has one made up of Spokane Community College students studying to be professional firefighters. Most such student firefighters are paid, says Gatlin.
But in Moscow, the students, like the rest of the firefighters, are volunteers.
Moscow successfully operates without the safety net of a professional fire department to protect city and UI property valued at more than $600 million, because the students and regular volunteers are unusually dedicated.
“After the monitors go off and say ‘Flames showing,’ I can count on a minimum of 30 firefighters,” says Gatlin. “It doesn’t matter what time of day it is. That has always amazed me.”
The student program provides the city an important benefit. A component in setting fire insurance rates is a community’s firefighting readiness, and professional firefighters are valued above volunteers by the Survey and Ratings Bureau. Moscow has only three paid firefighting positions, the chief, a fire marshal, and a training officer.
“But because the students live here at the stations, they are considered full-time, and the Survey and Ratings Bureau gives us credit for 16 positions,” says Gatlin.
A lot of responsibility rests in the hands of people in their early 20s. After completing an 80-hour basic firefighting class and learning to drive the trucks and operate the pumpers, the students are responsible for maintaining equipment, getting it to fires, and taking charge of a fire scene until Gatlin or other officers arrive.
They also set their own duty shifts, and, mostly by themselves, make sure the experience of communal living in a fire station works.
“It’s like you really have a bunch of brothers and sisters,” says Tschida, 23, a nutrition major from Weippe, Idaho. He’s been in the program about three years.
“If somebody doesn’t do their dishes, you get upset, like you do in a family,” says Tschida. “We have our little bickers, and then we get over it.”
They are a close-knit group, unlike any on campus, says Todd Hustrulid, 22, a biosystems engineering major from the Spokane Valley.
“People try to compare it to the dorms or a fraternity, and it’s totally different. The difference is in the way we relate to each other.”
Parkinson explains: “You have to rely on each other to maybe save your life. You don’t do that in the dorms.”
She’s a 23-year-old resource recreation and tourism major from Moscow and has been in the program about 2-1/2 years.
Gatlin has been a Moscow firefighter 20 years. He says when he became chief in 1987, the job didn’t come with a manual on how to run the students. But for the most part, he’s found it rewarding.
“Sometimes I have to remind them that it’s more important for them to go to school than it is to fight fire. We’ve had some kids get so involved in firefighting and the whole program here that they drop out.”
The UI has no fire science major, but a number of students who got started as volunteers made careers of it. The most notable might be Al Walker, a UI student in the late 1970s. He has been the director of state fire service training in Idaho, Kansas, and now Louisiana.
Parkinson, and Vicki Edwards, 25, a recreation resource and tourism major from Ontario, Ore., are the only women now in the program.
It was a male enclave until the late 1980s when Kendra Smith, a biology major from Coeur d’Alene, became the first woman to live at a Moscow fire station. After finishing school, she became a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
Membership in the fire department engenders comradeship. But the regular volunteers and students sometimes are at odds with each other.
“It’s youth versus age,” Gatlin explains. “The students get frustrated, because things they want to change don’t get done right now. The other volunteers want to think about it. But they really do respect the students.”
Fraternal feelings flower when the students and regular volunteers mingle after a fire, says Gatlin. In the old days, such sessions might have involved a considerable amount of beer drinking. The volunteers generally could be counted on to flush a keg at one of their meetings.
“Now, we order one of those little pony kegs, and it lasts for two or three meetings.”
“But the fire department isn’t just a lodge or social club. An aspect of dread colors firefighting,” says Gatlin.
Sometimes, people die. Two construction workers were killed in a cave-in last spring. A fire alarm was called in for that accident, and students responded.
“People deal with it differently,” Tschida says. “We had a psychological debriefing afterward, and we talked about it a lot among ourselves.”
Being firefighters gives the students a way to connect with a city they otherwise might never see. Around the holidays, people drop off cookies and other treats for the firefighters, and every kid in town is in awe of the heroes clinging to a roaring red engine wrapped in the urgent wail of a siren.
That thrill is at the heart of firefighting, Gatlin says.
“School takes up a lot of time and energy, and I don’t always feel that I’m getting a lot back out of it,” Hustrulid says. “Firefighting feels like a way to get something done, to help people out.
“You can’t think about school when you’re doing this.”
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