20-year veteran firefighter gives a glimpse into the job

It took a few years for Ryan Harber to start his 20-year career with the West Lafayette Fire Department.

“When I was younger, I kind of stumbled upon the fire department,” Harber said.

He volunteered in Wabash for several years before finally jumping into a fire suit full-time when he got the chance in 2004. Since, he’s climbed to battalion chief, a role which puts him in command at the scene of fires and disasters in the community.

He had his experience to thank about a year ago, when he realized a burning house was about to collapse as he crawled on its spongy floor.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

When did you realize this career was for you?

When I was younger, I kind of stumbled upon the fire department. And just over the years, I grew to love it and when I was in my early 20s, I joined the Wabash Township—a volunteer fire department and my passion for the fire department grew.

At one point, I decided that it was something that I wanted to pursue as a career and I finally got the opportunity when I turned 26 years old. So I got hired back in April of 2004. And I’ve been loving it ever since.

What is the training program for firefighters?

Regardless where you’ve come from, we’ll send a new person over to Lafayette’s Fire Academy and they will basically run you through everything: you’ll get your EMT, emergency medical technicians certificate, you’ll get everything you need to do with hazmat, hazardous materials, events.

They do a lot of PT, or physical training. You’ll know how to use extrication tools, the cutters and spreaders and that kind of stuff. That is roughly a four month program, and when you come back from that you’re ready to go on the truck, and then it’s just a matter of experience, and going out there and doing the real thing.

I always suggest that people join one of the volunteers because you can get a lot of the same training with them. They are getting just as busy out on the outskirts of the cities as we are here.

What is a typical shift?

So we have three shifts: A, B and C shifts. The shifts are 24-hour shifts, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This week, our shift today is our first day. So, we will work today, which is Saturday, and then work Monday and Wednesday.

We get four days off and then the rotation would start over. So the next week we would work Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So we know as long as we’re on this shift. We know our schedule years in advance. It’s just the way it works out. We do a minimum of 12 on shifts spread over three stations.

What kind of situations are you prepared for?

We are prepared for just about everything. Generally, we deal with medical issues. That’s our biggest item: heart attacks, falls, diabetic issues, strokes, you name it and we deal with it.

We can get there before an ambulance and try to help out the best we can. Sometimes we can fix the issue. Sometimes we just keep people stable until the medic truck gets there and they go to the hospital. We deal with gas leaks, we deal with fires.

We’ve dealt with something as little as ducks in a storm drain. You know, we’ve also gotten cats out of trees a couple times, believe it or not.

How has safety and equipment gotten better over the last 20 years?

Fire trucks are bigger so we’re able to carry more equipment that we would need, plus the engines are better and we can get there a bit faster.

We have higher capacity pumps and the technology in our fire gear is better. That helps us stay relatively cooler in hot situations. Just about every year there’s something on the horizon that we’re keeping an eye on. The jaws of life, which are what cut up a car so a person can get out, no longer run from a hydraulic pump and now are run off batteries.

How often do fires happen?

There are a lot of little fires, but we’re such a compact city that we get there fast and the situation gets mitigated quickly. As for large fires, I would we probably have maybe one or two large fires a year.

How do you handle ethanol fires?

I personally have never seen any ethanol fires here. I imagine we probably have a couple places that deal with ethanol. Our biggest concern right now are lithium ion batteries: scooters have them, and because of the way that chemical chain reaction happens, when a fire occurs, you pretty much cannot put those out.

We have special tarps that we use now to put over the item to kind of contain it. Electric vehicles are almost impossible to put out so you just have to wait for the chain reaction to stop. We haven’t had an electric vehicle catch fire yet, but eventually it will happen.

College students will charge them and if they end up exploding, water will only make it worse, it’ll cause serious damage and even injuries.

When you’re battling a large fire, if you have to go into a burning building, how do you assess the risk of whether it’s going to collapse?

Really a lot of it will come down to experience. You just have a feel when you go in somewhere. An example: we just helped out Wabash Township for a fire last year, and we went into a house and started crawling along. You could feel the floor. It was spongy. That’s a sign of ‘Hey, let’s get out.’