By Mara H. Gottfried
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — They call it Hell Week for the St. Paul fire recruits.
The pinnacle: A 16-hour overnight shift, responding to simulated fires and medical calls. They practiced high-rise fires, an explosion, responded to someone in cardiac arrest, extricated people from vehicles and more.
The main purpose was to see how the recruits perform under pressure, said Capt. Jerry Deno, a training assistant.
“Pretty much anything you could get, they throw at you that week,” said recruit Mike Paidar.
Most of the recruits ended up going through the long day twice — voluntarily, to help a classmate make it to graduation — a sign of the camaraderie that builds during the 14-week academy, Deno said.
The 12 recruits who graduate from the St. Paul fire academy today are among 2,500 people who applied to be St. Paul firefighters last year. They are the first hired from the latest list of eligible firefighters the city established.
“You have to be at the top of your game to get here,” Deno said. “It’s the right combination of brains and brawn.”
The recruits’ ages range from 25 to 44. Some have firefighting experience, and some have military backgrounds.
Three of the recruits are women — they all happen to be named variations of Kate, though everyone is called by the last name in the academy — and they bring the number of female firefighters in the department to 19. Including the three, the St. Paul fire department has hired five female firefighters in the past decade, with one in 2005 and one in 2008.
All told, the new firefighters bring the St. Paul force to 433 firefighters.
Many recruits said the daily physical training was the most difficult part of the academy.
They’d run up and down stairs at least 10 times at the drill tower at the fire department’s training center while wearing 55 pounds of gear.
“It’s six stories, 80 stairs, to be exact,” said recruit Ben Hamm, who was a part-time firefighter and paramedic in a Madison suburb, and came to the area to become a St. Paul firefighter, with no ties to the Twin Cities. At the top of the steps, they’d do 20 push-ups or other exercises, Deno said.
Other parts of physical training included ax chops that simulate forced entry to a roof, working their “chopping muscles” and building endurance, and dragging logs to build the same muscles used to pull hoses filled with water, Deno said.
“I’ve always been a good athlete, but my age doesn’t help that much,” recruit Pablo Bonilla said of the physical training. “I’m 36, not 20 years old anymore.”
Bonilla traded in more than a decade of work in corporate America to become a firefighter. After he was laid off as a merchant at Best Buy headquarters in Richfield, his wife said, “Why don’t you do what you’ve always wanted to do? You’ve always wanted to be in the military; you’ve always wanted to be a firefighter.”
Hell week
The first 16-hour day for Hell Week came last week, on a day when the temperature reached the upper 80s with thick humidity.
One recruit passed out, falling down a flight of stairs, Deno said. The recruit was OK, but he wouldn’t have graduated if he couldn’t get through the 16-hour day.
The recruits agreed to recreate the long day and, though they were required to work only eight hours, most stayed for the extra eight hours Tuesday, Deno said.
On both days, the recruits fought eight to 10 fires and responded to faux medical calls in between, Deno said. (All St. Paul firefighters must be emergency medical technicians, and some are paramedics.) The previously stricken recruit made it through the second time.
In April, the recruits had “live-fire training” at a house owned by a private company, which donated it to the city for fire training because it was planning to tear the structure down, Deno said.
“It was the most real,” Hamm said. “We had a real house that was actually burning, and we didn’t know exactly what the inside looked like, so it was like responding to a real fire. It wasn’t like the burn building out here (at the training center), when we know exactly what’s around every corner.”
Kate Heckaman said she liked piecing together all of their lessons into the live-fire training. “And it was a pretty big adrenaline rush,” she said.
Heckaman and the other two female recruits, who represent the most women firefighters in one class in St. Paul since 1992, come from Minnesota firefighting families: Caitlin Peterson’s dad was a volunteer firefighter in Wadena. Katie Keegan’s grandfather, great-grandfather and two great-uncles were St. Paul firefighters. Heckaman’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were St. Paul firefighters.
Balancing act
The balancing act between home and training was another difficult part of training, recruits said; many of their spouses picked up the bulk of household work during the academy.
Heckaman said it was hard to be away from her children — a 6-year-old and twins who will be 3 in June — so much during the academy. But she thinks she’ll see them more in her new job than her schedule as an occupational therapist allowed. Firefighters in St. Paul work 24-hour shifts, every other day for four days, and then have a longer stretch of days off.
“The physical demands of the job are such that you work until exhaustion and then some,” said Mike Paidar, who’s 6 feet 9 inches tall and became known as “Big Mike” at the academy. “You’ve got to be prepared for it. You’ve got to have your body right, and you’ve got to have your mind right.”
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