As they mark their 25th year, members of the Deerfield Township Fire Department are inviting community members to take a look around, have a bite to eat and learn about the volunteers who respond to all kinds of emergencies.
The celebration is May 19th, a week from Saturday.
Chief Ryan Martin and his fire department are hosting an open house from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., when residents can show up at the firehouse and learn a few things about being a firefighter.
“We’re going to have fire department station tours,” Martin said. “We’ll bring them in and show them our gear and different tools on our truck that we use. We’re also going to have food provided by Maxon’s Blue BBQ out of Beal City.”
Martin has been the chief of the fire department for 10 years. He’s been with the department since April 3, 2000 when Joe Grinzinger, a firefighter at the department at the time, encouraged him to apply.
“He just saw me one day in the store,” he said. “He gave me an application just as I was turning 18. I filled it out, brought it up here, handed it in to the chief, and he called me back and said ‘We’re meeting here next Thursday for a training meeting.’ I’ve been here ever since.”
The Mt. Pleasant native is excited to show the younger residents the inner workings of being a firefighter.
“We’re going to have demonstrations with all of our gear on for the children,” he said. “When we go into schools with it all on it’s like they’re scared, and we want them to know ‘Hey, it’s just us. We want to help you.’ You know, if there’s a house fire we want them to make noise and to crawl to us not away from us.”
A Mobile Medical Response team will also be present to give ambulance tours, while the sheriff’s department will have personnel on the scene to answer questions and conduct tours of a police vehicle.
“We have the cutout of a side of a house,” he said. “There’s going to be flames in the window, so they will get to spray a fire hose at the flames and the flames will go down.”
To become a firefighter in the state of Michigan requires 270 hours of training. That includes in-class and hands-on training. After that, there are numerous certifications that can be earned from the state.
“The struggle that we have in the department is membership,” he said. “We have 17 people on our roster now. Keeping local people here is hard because it takes a lot of time to be trained, takes a lot of time away from your family, and you can get called away from any event in an instant. It’s a country-wide issue.”
Car accidents, downed power lines, grass and car fires and methamphetamine labs are all things that a firefighter can encounter on a regular basis. All of these various situations necessitate proper training.
As chief, Martin oversees the training and passes on knowledge from his own experiences.
“My job as chief is pretty easy,” he said. “We have a great township that backs us in what we do. They’re behind us 100 percent, and I think that’s what makes my job a lot easier. There are still procedures that you have to pass down to firefighters, but I like to help alleviate that pressure in my trainings.”
In his time with the fire department, many things have changed around Martin.
“The technology has changed a lot,” he said. “The tools and equipment that we use is different now. There used to just be two bays with five trucks. 25 years later, we have seven bays with seven trucks. We also house the county’s fire investigation team. There used to be a medical response bay until they moved into Mt. Pleasant. Now it’s our gear and workout room. StageRight in Clare donated our workout equipment.”
While some firefighters have come and gone in Martin’s tenure, it’s still the in-house relationships that keep him coming back to work every day.
“It’s a big family here,” he said. “We’re all friends. Whenever we hire somebody new they’re immediately embraced and shown the ropes. We’re all outdoorsmen, so we like to hunt and fish together. When we leave here we almost always go to somebody else’s house to hang out and have dinner with each other’s family. Working here is like having an extension of your family. The wives would probably agree that we spend more time with each other than we do with them.”