Sometimes recruits don't make the cut

 9 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

By LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star

It was April 25, a Friday. Another week almost down.

But Tony Grazziano wasn’t looking forward to this Friday.

It was time for Lincoln Fire & Rescue recruits’ weekly evaluation, and his hadn’t been going well since he fell from a 40-foot ladder trying to “rescue” a fellow recruit from the third-floor window of the training tower.

[+]Enlarge

Lincoln Firefighter trainee Tony Grazziano runs with a 5-inch hose during a training exercise April 9 at the Southeast Community College training facility. (Eric Gregory)

Lincoln Firefighter trainee Tony Grazziano runs with a 5-inch hose during a training exercise April 9 at the Southeast Community College training facility. (Eric Gregory)

Related Media

Becoming a firefighter

Follow the seven recruits week by week as they progress through their training. (Laura Meerkatz / JournalStar.com)...

Comments: 0

Rated:

Grazziano, seven weeks into his 14-week training, had had a stressful two weeks since Fire & Rescue Capt. Tim Linke told him the department would decide his fate soon.

At the time, the recruit from Omaha said he was sure he’d still make it to the rigs in June. But on this Friday morning, Linke was waiting at the South Street training tower to tell him to go to Fire Station 1 at 18th and Q streets.

There, he was handed a three-sentence letter saying he’d been terminated. His pay would stop at 10 o’clock.

Grazziano said later that he sat stone-faced after hearing the news, then asked Assistant Fire Chief John Huff if they could talk about it. There wasn’t anything to say.

“I took my medicine and walked out,” said Grazziano, who is 36 and said he tested 17th among a few hundred hopefuls for Lincoln Fire & Rescue in 2006.

He said that he thinks he was fired because of the March 26 incident, and that he believes safety ropes should have been used during the training exercise.  

On that day, just after 2:30 p.m., Grazziano lost his footing trying to carry fellow recruit Parry Siebenaler down the ladder, his weight on Grazziano’s knee to simulate a rescue from a third-story window of the South Street training tower.

Siebenaler managed to grab the ladder, but Grazziano fell parallel to it and hit Jordan Petersen, a recruit who was helping hold the 40-foot ladder. He and Petersen  hit their heads on concrete, knocking their helmets off. They were taken to the hospital, but checked out OK.

“I never wanted that ladder incident to happen,” Grazziano said a month later. “It just seemed from that point on I was the worst guy in the training class.”

Linke said he can’t talk about Grazziano’s firing.

In March, he said he hoped all seven recruits made it, but he warned that there are no guarantees.

In the past five years, six newly trained firefighters have not completed the six-month probation period. Two left on their own; four were “let go.”

When recruits have been in training as long as Grazziano had, Linke said, he looks for as close to perfection as possible.

“At 7:01 on their first shift they could be called to go save somebody, go help somebody out,” he said then. “It’s important to me that those guys … get a good product when they come out.”

Dan Wright, deputy chief of training for Lincoln Fire & Rescue, declined to comment on Grazziano’s firing. Of the process, Wright said that when a recruit class starts, the department believes everyone will make it through. Sometimes that’s not the case.

“I guess that’s just the way it is sometimes,” he said.

Grazziano, 36, said getting the call to join the recruit class changed his life.

“I couldn’t wait to get down here and get started,” he said.

He knew going in he wasn’t in the best shape of his life. According to a department assessment, he was 50 pounds overweight.

But Grazziano said he did his  best and started to lose weight.

He feels like he was set up to fail that day on the ladder — the shortest recruit sent to rescue the tallest at the end of a full day.

After that, he said, it was as if he couldn’t do anything right.

Grazziano said it seemed as though he was expected to know everything already. If the department is looking for experienced firefighters, he said, that should be in the ad.

“I’m disappointed,” he said five days after he was fired. “These days (not being in class) are just killing me.”