5 Hours in the Shadow of Merrimack's Finest

There are two things that are pretty much always true at the Merrimack Fire Department: Bring in a reporter for a ride along and you hang out in the station all afternoon and “when it rains it pours.”

For the sake of this column, I'm happy to say that the latter was true and the former, by default, was not.

On Friday, May 10, I went out on four calls with the Merrimack Fire and Rescue staff from both the Central Fire Station and the South Station over on Naticook Road.

The afternoon started ordinarily enough. I took a tour of the station with Lt. Jason Marsella who was in charge at the Central Station that day.

Marsella, a 17-year veteran of the Merrimack Fire Department is usually in charge down at the South Station, but was working Central that day because the shift captain was on vacation.

He was about five hours into a 24-hour shift, a common shift among staff, many of whom work 24 hours on, 72 hours off. There are attendant shifts as well, that add man power from 8 a.m.-10 p.m.

Check out the photo gallery and slideshow of Friday's calls here

And then there are the call firefighters who are also ready for a moment's notice, but are at home unless they get called to either head to a scene or simply to cover the stations when the duty staff is on scene.

The guys who are on 24 hours have rooms to where they can relax at night, but sleep is rare. Regardless of what kind of night it is, busy or slow, the state of being ready to go at a moment's notice keeps them alert through their shifts.

Marsella took me around the station.

We visited the gear room, complete with a fire pole – much to my surprise. (For some reason I had it in my mind that fire poles had gone away.)

We sat and talked in the exercise room – a decent sized room filled with equipment donated by the union – and chatted for a bit about the changes to the department over Marsella's 17 years. The

The biggest change has been the drastic reduction in volunteer firefighters, he said. It's a matter of time and commitment. Volunteer firefighters are expected to be trained and certified like the paid staff and given the number of hours required for this, it's just not as feasible as it once was, Marsella said.

The department's staff has also seen significant reductions in the last several years.

He with reduction in staff, it has also meant no longer staffing the station in Reeds Ferry across from St. James Church. That station is used to house peripheral apparatus and Marsella it's a long-term goal to get some call firefighters back into that station.

The apparatus is multi-functional, as is the staff, Marsella said. All firefighters are trained EMTs and all apparatus is equipped in such a way that they are ready for all sorts of scenarios.

“Because of our limited manpower, our apparatus has to be multi-functional,” Marsella said. “As a firefighter now, you have to know so much more, you have to do so much more.”

Waiting for any sort of call to come in, Marsella, Kelly and Leite had been busy working on some spring cleaning and general cleaning around the station.

“We take pride in what the station looks like,” Marsella said.

Fridays are also reserved for making sure they run all of the equipment at some point in the day to make sure it's in proper working order.

Master Firefighter Paul Kelly showed me around Engine 1 and all the gear and tools in the compartments that is used to save homes, save lives or even just to save memories in the stuff they are able to salvage from homes during an emergency. It was during a demonstration of how the ladder on the side of Engine 1 is mechanically lowered to make it easier and safer to grab, when the first call came in.

What had been a quiet afternoon to that point was about to change. The first call came in, it was a medical call on Winchester Drive.

With the South Station being closer, Engine 2 was dispatched, with Ambulance 1 from the Central Station.

13:59 * WINCHESTER DRIVE MEDICAL CALL

I buckled into the passenger seat while EMT Kevin Chambers got behind the wheel and EMT Matt Loranger loaded up in back. As we rolled out of the parking lot, Chambers flipped on the lights and sirens and we started a journey across town in a fraction of the time it takes to cross town in a car.

Chambers and I chatted about the use of different sirens and horns and how frequently cars motorists are oblivious to an ambulance screaming up behind them. For the most part, people got right out of the way, but a couple of extra pumps of the horn were needed on a couple cars as we raced down Continental Boulevard.

Arriving on Winchester Drive for the call, I stayed in the passenger seat while Chambers and Loranger joined Lt. Rick Barrows and Firefighters Kip Caron and Tom Dalton inside. Neighbors across the street peered over periodically watching the commotion.

A few minutes later, a car pulled into the driveway and a couple hopped out.

I snapped a few photos from inside the ambulance and then Chambers appeared at my door to let me know I was going to transfer vehicles and  ride back to the station with the guys of Engine 2.

The patient's mom wanted to ride in the ambulance, not an unusual request, Chambers said, but one that was made so by my presence.

Happy to experience a trip in a fire truck (nearly 32 years old and almost nine years in journalism and I haven't done this) I climb out of the cab and walk over to the truck.

“I guess I'm hitching a ride with you?” I ask a firefighter I've never met before.

“Oh, OK,” says Dalton. “Who are you?”

I introduce myself and given the situation, his next question certainly seems fitting.

“How did you get here?” he asks.

Apparently Chambers hadn't filled him in.

I'm shown a seat in the back of Engine two and buckle in amongst the equipment and gear. It's a warm afternoon, probably mid-70s and on a residential medical call, the guys are suited up just in their standard slacks and red polos. There's a lot of gear in the back.

The truck is loud as we start driving down the road, this isn't the type of vehicle conducive to small talk as we have to talk loudly over the noise. I'm in back with Caron, and Barrows is riding shotgun. We've just turned onto Amherst Road when the next call comes in.

A two-car accident near mile marker 13 on the Everett Turnpike.

15:29 * EVERETT TURNPIKE NORTHBOUND M/V ACCIDENT

Dalton flips on the lights and sirens and before I know it, we're flying toward the highway.

I've been on the highway when fire truck is trying to get to an accident. It's one of those situations where you hear the sirens and instinct says, pull to the right, but if you're in the left lane, what do you do?

It was like parting the seas (watch the video above). We straddled the two lanes as we pushed cars to the left and right for about a mile and a half.

We pulled up to two vehicles that had collided and were now sitting in the grassy median next to the guardrail between the north and southbound lanes.

Barrows asked me to stay in the truck until the situation was determined to be under control then I climbed out with a bright yellow and red vest to observe and snap photos.

Of interesting, and terrifying note, was a comment Barrows made to me as I was trying figure out why my zipper was zipped but my vest still open.

They have tear away velcro, he said, so if a car mirror snags it as it passes and accident scene, it takes the vest, not the person in it.

I must have had a horrified expression on my face because he said, “You wouldn't believe how close cars get.”

He also said that if a driver and emergency worker make eye contact, that driver will not hit you. (Good to know, but seriously, folks, these guys have a dangerous enough job fighting fires, slow it down if you're traveling by an emergency on the road.)

While both victims were out of the vehicles and walking around when we got there, the guys on scene ended up loading the female driver into the car that was hit from behind, and Ambulance Two, driven by Rich Ducharme and co-piloted by Leite, headed off toward Catholic Medical Center.

We loaded back into Engine 2 and headed back to the Central Station to find it mostly empty.

Call Firefighter Bill Pelrine was there covering the station while Ambulance 1 was still out on Winchester Drive's trip to Nashua, Ambulance 2 was headed to Manchester and Engine 1 had been dispatched to a medical call at Blanchard Point at the northern end of Daniel Webster Highway. With all other units out, a Bedford ambulance had been called to assist there.

When it rains, it pours.

No truer words.

16:10 * GREELEY ST and DW HIGHWAY M/V ACCIDENT

We'd been back at the station no more than five minutes when we got the call for a three-car accident on Greeley Street at the entrance to TD Bank.

Clamoring back into Engine 2, with Pelrine in tow, we arrived to three police cars on the scene, and smash-up blocking the driveway in and out of the parking lot for TD Bank, as well as a handful of businesses on Mound Court.

Two of the cars' occupants were out and walking around while a third was in her vehicle still. We were joined shortly thereafter by Ambulance 1, and once again this team of firefighters and EMTs got to work evaluating the occupants, talking with them about what happened. They backboarded the woman in her car and sent her off with non-life-threatening injuries in the direction of Nashua.

Three tow companies, Bailey, Lewis and McKinney, arrived to remove the involved truck, Subaru and Honda.

After cleaning up debris and sweeping up the material laid on a fluid leak, we got back into the truck for a trip back to Central Station where we reconnected with Marsella, and later with Ducharme and Leite who had come across an accident scene they assisted at in Manchester on their way back from Catholic Medical Center.

It had been a busy afternoon, we joked about how I'd broken the ride along curse, and chatted about the various calls that afternoon. Leite and Ducharme had stumbled into quite a scene where a driver in Manchester was having a seizure behind the wheel when Leite approached the rogue vehicle rolling slowly at an intersection not far from the vehicle.

Then the radio rang again.

17:29 * BABOOSIC LAKE RD MEDICAL ALARM

Ambulance 1 was called to a medical up on the far end of Baboosic Lake Road.

We sat in the station chatting until Marsella came pounding down the stairs. The medical background given for the woman at the residence gave him some concern and he made the decision to roll up that way. So this time I hopped in the back of Engine 1 with Leite and with Ducharme at the wheel and Marsella shotgun. We headed for Baboosic Lake Road. With backwards view out the right window, Leite called out house numbers as we cruised around the twists and turns of Baboosic Lake Road. On more than one occasion I thought how I would not want to be coming the other direction on some of those tight corners.

It was a quick call. Chambers and Loranger brought the patient via Ambulance 1 to the hospital and we returned to the station with some Hotel California playing on the classic rock station.

I decided to call it a day there, after about 5 hours of hopping from truck to truck.

***   ***   ***

To say what the men and women of Merrimack's Fire and Rescue department do on a day-to-day basis is awe inspiring would be an understatement. You walk into a day with no real idea of what's going to happen.

Some days it's a lot of station clean up, training drills and similar tasks, moving turtles from the parking lot or rescuing baby beavers from the dam (well, from what I hear that happened only once) other days you're running from medical calls, to accidents to fires and you spend eight hours on the road without ever returning to the station.

Some nights you get called to a fire that is ripping apart a home or business in town, and sometimes early in the morning you get pulled to a brush fire that ignited when a camp fire wasn't properly extinguished the night before.

There's no rhyme or reason to the day and no assurances that your life won't be put into some sort of danger when you arrive at an accident on the highway or a house fire in Merrimack or a nearby community.

Having been in Merrimack as the editor of Patch for nearly two years, I've built relationships with Merrimack's emergency services personnel and with town administration, but until you spend a day in the the shadow of someone else's job, be it a firefighter, a police officer, a plow driver or even the town administrator (I'm looking at you, Eileen Cabanel), it's hard to truly comprehend how important these professions and the people doing them are to keeping Merrimack a great place to work and live.

Thank you to Lt. Jason Marsella, Lt. Rick Barrows, and firefighters Rob Leite, Paul Kelly, Tom Dalton, Kip Caron, Bill Pelrine, Rich Ducharme, Kevin Chambers and Matt Loranger for letting me tag along last week. You are truly an impressive bunch and Merrimack is well-served to have you and the rest of the department at their service 365 days a year.