 Hi, my name is Suzanne Feiss. I'm an ambassador from Winston County, and I'm going to be introducing David Brossel's, a firefighter, and I'll be interviewing him. What got you into firefighting? Well, I'll try to keep this brief. When I was graduating high school, I wasn't sure what I wanted to go into. I had two different interests. One was photography and the other was, I was interested in like search and rescue. I grew up in Oregon, just outside of Eugene. So, you know, maybe flying a helicopter and doing search and rescue was of interest to me. So I talked to a couple of my faculty members at my high school and I didn't feel I had the passion or necessarily the smarts, especially in the chemistry field to go pre-med. So they said, well, go biology, do that. So I started my freshman year and my biology class was so boring. And I wasn't having a whole lot of fun with it. And we produced a freshman class meeting where we did a spoof kind of off the newlywed game, which is you wouldn't remember and is dating myself for my age. And I got exposed to the Radio and Television Department at my university. And a guy I graduated high school with was a broadcast engineering major there. And I got really interested. So I went home that summer, changed my major and went into Radio and Television. My mom's a professional artist. I have a natural ability with composition. My professor saw that and kind of geared me towards videography. And so I graduated in 87, immediately got a job as a television photojournalist in Augusta, Georgia. And then I hopscotched around the country from there to Chattanooga, to Tucson, to Seattle, then back to Nashville. Spent 22 years as a photojournalist and producer in television news doing a lot of investigative stuff. And while in Nashville, we were doing an investigation in the EMS response times, which was taking about 11 and a half minutes to get on scene for life threatening where they needed advanced life support. And through doing that investigation and working with our health reporter, we started reaching out into middle Tennessee and doing mass CPR events for the public because CPR in Tennessee is not something the late person is really exposed to. You only have to really know CPR as a job requirement for certain jobs. So through doing that, I got exposed to my local volunteer fire department in the Pleasant View, Tennessee area. And of course, growing up in Oregon, very few volunteer departments to speak of most are covered with property tax. And so I thought my local department was a career paid department. Come and find out there volunteer. And the second CPR event we did, I talked to the chief. I said, well, what's involved being a volunteer? And he said, well, you know, this that other thing. I said, well, I've got about five hours a week. Maybe I can donate. Well, that five hours I got cooked and it became before it was all said and done. I was doing probably about 40 hours a week plus my 40 hour TV job. And, you know, it was kind of the pendulum swinging back the other way, back to when I graduated high school, getting back to that search and rescue thing. I found I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed serving the community. It felt good to give back. And so I started pursuing all my state certifications and whatnot. And after about nine years there, Nashville was advertising that they were taking applications. And through my media exposure, I knew a lot of the top brass at Nashville. So I tested. I tested the top of my class. I ranked the highest on the physical agility with others. And 2008, February, they offered me a position. I took a huge pay cut, but I haven't regretted it. And I've been a career firefighter since then. So I've been in the fire service about almost 20 years now, total. And just feel blessed to have this opportunity at a second career after basically as a photojournalist having a front row pass, if you will, to people's history and things going on all over. And now it's a firefighter. I unfortunately have a front row pass to often folks worse day, but try to make it better. Sorry, that was a long answer. Oh, I think you got two questions in one. So that works out. What is the day like as a firefighter? You know, we work a 24 on, 48 off. So our shift swap starts at 6 a.m. We need to be ready to go, ready to respond at 6 a.m. So that requires getting into the hall at about 520 or 530-ish. I'm an engineer, so I actually drive the apparatus. So I have to go in and I have to get the engineer that's coming off duty, get his gear off, put the engine, put my gear on, and then go through all checklists and making sure everything's ready to go with the apparatus. And then when he gets up, I have a cup of coffee, talk about his shift, what's going on, what's going on with the piece apparatus, are there any issues that need to be addressed, anything to watch out for? So that's kind of the start of the day. And then you have 24 hours of unplanned chaos. You are called, you know, the fire department's called when they don't know who else to call, not just for emergencies. So it could be someone that has locked the keys in their car and can't get in. And then we've got to, you know, if it's a non-life-threatening thing, we'll probably have them call a pop-a-lock company. But if there's a baby inside or an animal, and especially in this heat that we're experiencing now, we might have to break a window and get in or maybe we can manipulate the lock and open it without doing any damage. And then there's just, you know, the fire service isn't really about putting out fires so much as it is become a first responder model. When you look at the health of Americans nowadays, hypertension, the obesity, the diabetes, all of this. And then we have an aging demographic. Oftentimes it's not unheard of. Four, five, six times a shift, gravity gets the better of somebody and they're on the ground and can't get up. And we're just called to go help them get back in. They're not injured, but just get them back in their chair on their couch in their bed and make sure that they're okay and don't need to be transported to the hospital. What is the best thing about your job? I think the best thing is, you know, after 24 hours, you go home thinking, hey, you know, maybe I made the community just a little better. I was able to help somebody. There's just, there's so much fulfillment in that. I think often, you know, we forget as humans, we are wired, we're so strict. And I think most folks want to help other folks. So to be in a position to get paid to help people, I think that's probably the most rewarding. What are some common misconceptions about your job? That all we do is sit in a lazy boy reciner and watch TV. First and foremost. And I guess too, all we do is fight fire. 80, probably 80% of the just medical need of some sort. What are the pros and cons of being a firefighter? Ooh. The pros are, you know, getting to work with just a great group of folks that, you know, we're all pretty much like-minded. We can disagree on philosophy, politics, religion, sports, but when the tones drop and the emergencies before us, we're all on one team, everybody gets along, everybody works as hard and as seamless as possible to get the job done. That camaraderie is really something else. I think that's what most people like about the fire service, the brother and sisterhood, the cons. It's getting up three, four, five times a night, getting that sleep cycle messed up. That they're finding through studies that really has a lot of wear and tear on your cardiovascular system. And it really can be stressful and it shortens your lifespan. That, a lot of heavy lifting. The reason I've got a beard, I've been off since last November. The last call I went on was at 4.20 in the morning and an older person had fallen, couldn't get up. We went to go lift them. And, you know, I had a blue disc out up in my C6, C7. And I just recently had disc replacement surgery. So I'm rehabbing right now. Hope to get back to work this fall. So it's challenging physically on your body and it can be mentally. I think another, if I can go back and answer this question and answer the last question, are the two questions ago about misconceptions. Suicide has become an epidemic amongst first responders. We lose more first responders to suicide than we do to line a duty deaths. The nature of the job, the constantly having to try to fix something that's broken. And because the way our society doesn't want to choose to deal with a root problem, it often just wants to put a bandaid on it and we are the bandaid. We wanna fix things. We wanna make things better. And when we go to the same type call over and over and over again over 15, 20 years and have the same outcome, it's broken, it can't be fixed. I think there's some despondency that builds up amongst first responders and I think that leads to it. So the other con is losing brothers and sisters to suicide and feeling hopeless to change some things and that we go out and see. What training is required as a firefighter? Good question. And when I tell young folks and folks that wanna get into the business, be prepared to be a professional student because you're constantly having to go and train and learn on an annual basis. We have so many hours of training to keep current, continuing education units is what they're called CUs. So there's both a book knowledge of understanding the physics and science behind fire and then techniques and things that we do to mitigate those fires or rescues or on emergency scene, treat medically. And then there's the hands-on, actually doing the psychomotor skills. So if you don't use a skill or you don't use a muscle set, what happens? You either forget it or that muscle set becomes weak. I'm saying, it's saying my internet's weak. Can you still hear me? Yeah, I can still hear you. Okay, so to pick up my train of thought again, it's everything as far as training goes, everything from the classic what is fire, understanding what fire is, understanding how you can extinguish fire to certain types of rescues to then the medical response. So it's a wide variety. And the thing that's changed in the fire service over the last generation is we've gone from being fire related to all hazards related. And so your question is hard to answer, short and short, simple answer because the training required is vast. So what advice would you give the youth interested in your job? Have a passion to learn, have a passion to care and find a good volunteer department near you and go speak with them and get some hands-on training and do all you can to learn all you can. The other thing that's almost a requirement now and doesn't matter who's hiring is your emergency medical technician certificate. So try to get through a program if your high school can get you involved in it, if your junior college can, get your EMT license. That will make you more valuable to those who are hiring because they're probably gonna require it anyways because like I've referred to earlier, 80% or more of what we do is medically based. So do that. All right, well, that concludes our interview then. It was very nice to talk to you. Well, I'm glad to help.