The Wooden Nutmeg

Connecticut started it’s Interstate Fire Crew in 1978, and this started become a regularly deployed unit after the 1988 fire season(1). That was the year of the great Yellowstone fires, and at least from my perspective as an east coast primarily structural firefighter seemed to mark the bend in a river, after which the spigot of funding opened up ever increasing resources to wildfire efforts out west.

It was around this time you started to see an increasing western influence in Connecticut as well as the rest of New England. Yellow shirts were far from universal even with state employees at this point, but they became more and more common.

If we turn the clock to 1990, the Interstate Fire Crew was well established but it, as it still does, depends on volunteers from outside the DEP to fill it out. Most major State Parks and State Forests maintained their own fire apparatus, and when the DEP was called to a fire the local Unit Manager and maintenance personnel would respond. I don’t know about the fulltimers, but the seasonal maintainers I worked with would simply receive on-the-job training from the fulltime tradesmen. (I worked a couple seasons during college in uniform as a “Park Aid” — i.e. security — for the DEP, my senior year I moved on and spent the summer doing conservation work for my town’s newly purchased conservation land).

The state still was operating it’s High School & UConn fire crews. These were phased out right around 1990, although I don’t know the exact year.

Yes, I said High School. In my region the closest was the Quaddick Crew out of Tourtellotte High School in Thompson, CT. These students who had received some basic training could be dismissed from classes and would meet up, if my memory is right, with the Unit Manager for Quaddick State Park and other DEP employees who would drive their apparatus. The UConn program was similarly run.

Here is a recollection from the Avon, CT Fire Department history about a youth crew from the high school their students attended in 1945:

I was a member back in 1945, at the age of 15 years old. I was on the State of Connecticut Forest Fire Crew that was made up of high school kids from the Canton High School. This crew went out on a minutes notice when the call came in on a forest fire. The state would call the high school and the principal would announce that the fire crew was excused to go out on the fire call. Our transportation was an old Packard four door with all our gear stored in a big wooden box on the rear bumper. Mrs. Fran Emigh was the driver and her husband was the State Forest Warden.

The good thing is these were organized crews, with some basic training and pre-existing leadership. It wasn’t unusual at the time for high school students to be “pressed” into service as this 1947 article from New York shows:

Even after the substantial modernization of the statutes governing Connecticut’s forest fire control laws in 2001 (Public Act 01-150), state fire control personnel retain the ability to summon the assistance of all able bodied residents between the age of 18 and 50 to duty to control forest fires.

Here’s an article discussing a fall fire that had the UConn crew respond:

These crews wound down around 1990, I’d assume from a combination of budget cuts (Governor Weicker was fighting to impose an income tax, so there was a lot of hanky panky with budgets going on(2)), increasing exposure to the “qualification system” used by the Interstate Fire Crews, and tightening up on the youth labor laws and general adoption of higher occupational safety standards. The continuing decrease in major fires from maturing forests, fewer sources of ignition (fewer cigarette smokers, better spark arrestors, less burning of yard debris and brush), more people traveling more frequently to detect fires sooner, 911, improved firefighter organization; tools; and notification systems, also likely contributed.

Since then, while fire qualified DEP employees seem to still be dispersed around the organization, the “Units” that respond to fires have also gone down. Natchaug State Forest and Pachaug State Forest remain the two units with apparatus, plus I believe the DEP Squaw Rock maintenance depot. Pachaug, in particular, is a major fire cache. The state parks at Quaddick, Mashamoquet, and Hopeville as far as I can tell no longer respond as units, although they may have individual employees respond. Fort Shantok State Park which also did fire duty no longer exists, having been turned back over to the Mohegan tribe.

Footnotes:
1) NYT article from September 15, 2002.

2) The state park I worked at in 1990 closed our more visible campground on a state highway. However we didn’t have any reduction in head count — fulltime or seasonal. It was simply the DEP political bosses ordering facilities closed to make it seem that we couldn’t afford to keep it open. As it was a rustic campground, the only marginal cost we saved was toilet paper and a weekly can full of lime for the pit toilets. The $6 or so we charged per night back then should have covered that expense.