WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Craig Pedercini can only hope that his retirement party will not be as memorable as that of his predecessor.

 

"The day of Chief [Ed] McGowan's retirement party, which was the 17th of January, we had a structure fire kind of early afternoon if I remember right," Pedercini recalls. "I was here, and I remember running out the door, and Chief McGowan happened to be popping in to say hi or whatever.

 

"I said, 'If you want to talk to me, you're going to need to get in the car because I'm going to a fire.' He jumped in, and we had a fire at what at the time was called the Chimney Mirror motel, which is now the Williamstown Motel. They had a laundry room fire. It wasn't terrible. We went in and put it out pretty quickly.

 

"But it was freezing out. We had water coming out of the truck because the hydrant was pushing so much to us, and the water was skating down the driveway out onto Route 2, and it created this big thing of ice. Having to deal with all that and getting a sander out there to make the road safe again and things like that.

 

"As you can see, I can remember the day and date. That was kind of memorable because it was my first one as a fire chief."

 

But certainly not his last.

 

Of course, he hopes he has had his last fire as the days count down to his retirement after 37 years with the Williamstown Fire Department — the last 22 as its chief.

 

Pedercini retires at the end of this month, the first major change in what promises to be a year of transition for the department.

 

At the end of the calendar year, the department plans to move into a new station on Main Street.

 

For decades, Pedercini has helped the department make the most of the Water Street station it long ago outgrew — coping with a decline in interest to serve on the call-volunteer service, campaigning for community support to build a 21st century station and, of course, fighting fires.

 

Recently, he sat down to talk about his time in service to the town, the challenges he has faced and how the new station will help better serve the community.

 

Question: Was this the first fire service you were on?

 

Pedercini: Yeah, I joined the Fire Department in 1988 as a volunteer. Back then, we came through the Gale Hose Company. You interviewed with the fire chief and the Gale Hose foreman. Together, they would collaborate, and the Gale Hose meeting would vote you in or out, depending how they favored you.

 

Q: And back then, could they afford to be a little more selective?

 

Pedercini: Actually, yeah. I bet you there were close to 38, 39 firefighters in the department back then. We had a pretty good roster. So they could be a little selective back then if they wanted to. 

 

Q: And you've seen that number change over the years?

 

Pedercini: Oh, it's definitely declined over the years. Even, myself, with the roster I had at the time, you see members if they're not coming around as much, you need to call them in, talk to them and say, 'What's the deal?' A lot of times, I've found out that between family, commitments, other things ... And I don't want to say they lost interest. It's just from other commitments, mainly their jobs and stuff. So they can't come to calls and stuff, so they end up stepping down.

 

Q: So you came on as a firefighter, and you were working at the time for the college?

 

Pedercini: I think I started with Williams College in 1982.

 

Q: And stayed full-time with them until ...?

 

Pedercini: Until I got this job. I worked in science division as a carpenter/cabinet maker. I don't know if you know Joe McCann, his brother was Charles McCann, who the McCann School is named for. This guy, Joe, I took his place. He was a carpenter and cabinet maker in that shop for many years.

 

Q: And when did you become chief?

 

Pedercini: I started, actually, Jan. 1, 2003. I left Williams the last couple of days of November. I worked with Chief McGowan basically the month of December. I shadowed with him and took over Jan. 1. Easy to remember.

 

Q: And what was the roster like then?

 

Pedercini: I would say we were probably around the 30 mark.

 

Q: So starting to trend down?

 

Pedercini: Yeah, it had trended down at that point. And I think we maintained that number or in the high 20s for many years.

 

Q: Was it supplemented with college students all along?

 

Pedercini: Back then we averaged about two college students at any given time. If we brought on a sophomore or freshmen, that's generally what we looked for. They would stay until they graduated, and you'd be looking for someone else

 

This group I have now, which are seniors. That's the biggest group I ever put on at one time, six students. I lost one due to his studies, so we went down to five. In the meantime, I already had two [students] on the department before that, so it gave me a total of eight.

 

Q: So what does the roster look like now?

 

Pedercini: Currently, I've got 11 [students] on the roster right now, out of 26. So you can see the increase with them. We'd be down [around 15]. Fifteen people to have on a roster is not a bad thing. But this is a good number here [26]. This is where we'd like to be. And that's why we started going in this direction and picking up students.

 

Q: Are you able to bring in people in their late 20s? Are you attracting that demographic?

 

Pedercini: Looking at the roster, John Kalapos came. He was probably in his late 20s or 30s when he came on. He's a school teacher at Buxton School. Micah [Mannery] is another one who has to be in his 30s now. We don't really ask them. If it's not really obvious, I might ask them, if they don't mind telling me, what their age is, because I start thinking about where they fit in.

 

Everybody can come in and have a job. We don't want to turn people away. Do we want people who can come in and do structural firefighting? Absolutely. That's like the biggest, most important thing for us. But, at the same time, if a person comes in and they're like, 'I don't think fighting fires is for me, but I can drive a truck. I can learn to pump a truck.' Then, yeah, OK. ... We will take an older person with some work experience if that's what they want to do.

 

There are a lot of things on the fire ground. I'll use the [recent] structure fire as an example. You arrive on the scene, and a lot of these college students, unfortunately, were not around for that, but they would have been great to have to not only pull line off a truck, make a hydrant — to have that extra manpower out there, to be able to say, 'Go grab another line, the chief wants one out back behind the house.' They could start doing that.

 

There is always stuff on the fire ground to do. You don't have to be an inside person. It just helps to have as many as you can trained at every level.

 

Q: Let's talk a little about the building. Obviously, I've heard you explain very clearly over the years the deficiencies of this building and the challenges of this building. With all of that, what can you say about the way that your people have coped with those challenges and been able to exist here and function here?

 

Pedercini: First of all, we didn't have a choice. 1950, this place was built. And I started pushing and asked the Prudential Committee. I don't want to say 'pushing,' but I asked the Prudential Committee back in 2006. I went back and looked at the minutes. That was the first time I brought up the new station. It was planting a seed, and it did start taking root, and we moved that forward. By 2008, I think we actually had the very first study done.

 

As far as the building and listing deficiencies with it, we knew this because, obviously, living here and working out of it all this time, we knew we had cramped quarters. We just learned to deal with it.

 

I'll give you an example: backing trucks in. It's such a tight space. At one time, we finally came up with a policy to say anybody backing a truck in has to have somebody behind them watching them back up. That person is the eyes and ears for anybody who might be getting in the way. We did that for a short time, and then we boosted it up by saying, 'If we're going to back trucks in, go grab a radio.' Because if you have a radio and it's on, if there's an issue, you can have the driver stop and so forth.

 

Q: Aside from the problems with the bay, you don't have the training area you need and things like that?

 

Pedercini: We train off site a lot. And, hopefully, with the new station, we'll do more training on site because we'll have that space where, hopefully, we've tried to anticipate. We lost the training tower at the very beginning that we were hoping to get out of [the building project]. Instead we tried to utilize the back stairwell to the new station, which is going to have on the back side of that stairwell a hole cut with a steel door. In the stairwell at the top of the stairs, it's going to be structurally set up so we can tether off firefighters. There will be a place with a big eye bolt or something where we can use carabiners to tie firefighters off so they can use that window for either ladder bails and going out a window to rescue themselves.

 

When the [expletive] hits the fan and you've got to go out a window, you don't want them hanging on the edge of a window. But if there's a ladder going up to the window, they can learn — and we've done this several different times — you go head first down a ladder. There's a way to turn yourself around and practice that. They call it ladder bails. We do that. This stairwell is going to give us the ability to practice that. It's going to give us provisions to practice throwing ladders up on the outside, firefighters going into a window, working both sides of it, in and out.

 

We're hoping to get a little bit of different types of training. There's a mezzanine in the new station, and my thoughts and I think the rest of the department will talk about this: Putting up some type of training obstacles. When you're doing [Rapid Intervention Team] training, RIT training is all about getting in and saving firefighters who might be trapped. So there are classes out there that help teach you that stuff. It also helps teach you to, hopefully, rescue yourself. If you're trying to crawl around in a house and all of a sudden find yourself entangled, you need to learn how to get out of that entanglement and practice getting out of it. It's not an easy thing sometimes. And get over walls and windows and things like that.

 

So building props that would help us do that — I'm looking at this mezzanine to set up multiple props where we can have training up there and firefighters can go up there masked, covered up and run through this type of stuff. You can simulate wire entanglement by building a prop for it. They've done this in many departments.

 

Q: Plus, like you said, you don't have the height that you need with this building.

 

Pedercini: We don't. We raise ladders in the back of the building, especially for beginners. But when you really want to get out and raise a 24- or 35-foot ladder ... In the past, before the new elementary school, we used to go down to the old General Cable down here before they renovated it. We used to pull in there, and we had this huge wall and practiced on that. When that kind of went away, we went over to the school and practiced. We still go to the school at this point to practice.

 

I'm hoping that we don't necessarily even have to leave the grounds if we don't want to. We might do it because we say, 'Let's throw it up at this place because it might be a different set up for us.' But, for the most part, you should be able to do a lot of stuff.

 

Q: Obviously, the building is going to be a big boon in a lot of respects. And you've been working on it since 2006. So I'm going to guess that's probably your biggest accomplishment?

 

Pedercini: I think it's going to be, yeah.

 

Q: What would be next on that list?

 

Pedercini: For accomplishments, I guess I would say we really got into grant writing. We got into more grant writing when it came to the building itself, the new station. But our first grant that we wrote and we received, I want to say it was around 2005. We put in for a Plymovent system. We put in for a few things, and we got the whole grant.

 

It's our truck exhaust system, which you see when you go out [into the bay]. That was kind of huge for us because, think about this: 1950 to 2005, there's a lot of time these trucks are coming in and out of the station, and there's no exhaust system and you're living in the truck room.

 

That was a huge win for us. The Plymovent system at the time was $65,000, and we were awarded that grant. We were also awarded additional funds. I want to say we got over $100,000 that year for two or three other things [in addition to the vent system]. That was kind of the start of us writing grants. After that it seemed like just about every year we would write for something.

 

We've gotten grants for personal protective equipment. We've gotten grants for SCBAs [self-contained breathing apparatuses]. We've worked with other towns and done regional grants.

 

Q: Any particular moments stand out in terms of events? The biggest one in recent years was the wildfire up on East Mountain. But what else jumps out at you in terms of structure fires?

 

Pedercini: I think about the Spring Street fire. That was a relevant fire for us, and it was for the town. It was right on that corner where it's a vacant lot right now. That was owned by Mark Paresky. You had the Purple Pub in the back. That's where the Purple Pub used to be.

 

That building burned pretty well, and he just ended up tearing it down and tearing everything else down. It started in the basement, that fire did. Again, that was a stubborn fire.

 

My predecessor, Ed McGowan, while he was chief in the late '90s, the upper block, same side, caught fire, where Spice Root, Blue Mango and the apartments up above it. ... Pretty much took the block down. Colonial Pizza used to be there. That turned out to be an electrical fire that started behind the building. That burned the whole block down

 

Q: Has the job shifted in the sense that inspections and prevention are more a part of the job than they would have been 25 years ago? Are you doing more of that stuff.

 

Pedercini: When it came to those type of things, we still did inspections on homes for smoke detectors when they sold it. Eddie [McGowan] did that. I just think the technology has gotten better in some cases. And I think fire prevention, you just go out and talk to people. You talk to the kids, and before you know it, the kids are adults. A bunch of adults I've talked to say, 'I remember getting that lecture from the firefighter in school.'

 

It's a little bit of everything. When we're out on calls, we try to educate. We can walk into homes, and people have their smoke detectors down, and we ask why, and they say, 'Well, it keeps going off. I can't stand it. I finally took it down.' And you try to educate them a little bit about why you need that back up and what you can do to prevent future detector activations. There's not much you can do about cooking sometimes, and codes dictate where detectors have to be. You're going to get false alarms. That's why they put hush buttons in them.

 

But you ask most people, and they don't even know that, 'There's a hush button in there?' Yeah, if you hold that button for 15 or 20 seconds, that thing will silence itself.

There's a lot of education, to be honest with you. That helps a lot.

 

Q: What's next for you?

 

Pedercini: I don't know. I've got some offers from people. If I wanted a full-time job at some places, I could probably go. But I don't want a full-time job. I'm 65 years old at this point. I still have a passion for the fire department. My goal is to stick around and be a pain in their butt maybe. But I'm gonna stick around here and help out with whatever I can to get the transition going.

 

I don't know if there's a future in running for Prudential Committee or not. That's been on my mind. Do I want to take a little time off first?

 

For now, my wife has a 'honey do' list. I have stuff at my house that I had built a dozen years ago, things that were intentionally not finished, and now I have time to finish them.

 

Locally, there are people who asked me about putting up smoke detectors. I thought about putting my services out there. Who knows better where they should go than me. I've got the carpenter skills in the background. I know how to run tools and a ladder. I may dabble in that.

 

My brother just retired from a food business. He's going to start up his own side business. I might work with him. Or I might start a new project where I need his help. Maybe we'll spend more time together than we have.