Stepping Up: Homewood Fire Department’s Nick Hill takes on the role of fire chief

Homewood Fire Department’s Nick Hill stepped up in January when his coworker, former Fire Chief John Alan Bresnan, died unexpectedly while on duty.

Now, after many months serving as interim fire chief, Hill is taking on the role of fire chief for the long haul.

Homewood Mayor Scott McBrayer announced Hill’s new role at a July 27 City Council meeting. The hiring process was tough, McBrayer said — usually when there are department head turnovers, it’s because someone chose to retire, he said. McBrayer asked Hill to serve as interim chief a few days after Bresnan’s death.

“I felt like Nick served our city with grace,” McBrayer said. “I feel like he served our city and the men and women of the Homewood Fire Department with a steadfast hand — something we desperately needed because of Chief Bresnan’s death. And he’s just done a tremendous job.”

Hill knew he wanted to be a firefighter from the time he was about 10 years old, he said. His dad was a firefighter for Mountain Brook, and his uncle was a firefighter for Birmingham.

“When you’re a kid, you want to be a firefighter for the reasons all kids want to be a firefighter: You want to get on that truck,” he said, laughing. “A lady came by the fire station the other day and told us her son loves it when we pull out of the fire station, turn the lights on and blow the horn. I said, ‘Me too.’ ... It never gets old.”

He would visit his father at the fire station and ask questions about what each piece of the fire engine could do. He learned so much that Hill said he knows about as much about fire engines today as when he was a child.

When his mother made him a uniform that looked like his father’s firefighting uniform, Hill wore it to his fourth grade career day and shared his knowledge about fire engines with the class. “I think I won career day that year,” Hill said.

When it was time to look for a full-time job firefighting, there weren’t any available, Hill said, so he took a job as a police officer in the Birmingham Police Department. Then, when a HFD job opened up 31 years ago, he took it, and he’s been at Homewood since.

“Homewood’s always been a really good place to work,” he said. “It’s stable, and the City Council and mayor do a good job of maintaining the finances.”

As fire chief, Hill will have a desk job. When he first started working at Homewood, though, this would have been the last thing he wanted to do — he wanted to fight fires. As he got older, he started to realize that fighting fires is painful, both physically and emotionally.

“When you’re doing your job — even though it’s to protect the lives and property of people — they’re losing everything that they worked for, and they’re having the worst day of their lives most of the time,” Hill said. “It makes loving this job bizarre almost. You love your job, and you’re glad to serve, and you want to be there for people, but they’re having the worst day of their lives. But it does make you feel proud to protect them and to minimize the damage.”

Homewood’s fire department, in particular, does a good job minimizing the damage, Hill said.

“We have good response times, we have aggressive firefighters, and I think we are really good at both EMS and firefighting,” he said. “We work well all around, and I’m really proud of that.”

Before Bresnan’s death, Hill was the fire marshall, which meant he managed the fire prevention office. He said the job was surprisingly interesting.

“I enjoyed the fire prevention office way more than I thought I would,” he said. “Nobody ever says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a fire inspector.’ But I liked it, and it was interesting.”

Hill had gotten into the groove of this role when Bresnan died. While Hill and Bresnan didn’t agree on everything, Hill said they were good friends.

“I would help him work on his house, and he would help me work on my house,” Hill said. “We were the same rank when I entered the fire service.”

It was an honor to step in as interim chief, Hill said, but there were also feelings of nervousness surrounding the event.

“It’s a big responsibility, and the way it happened, it wasn’t like we had time to ramp up and discuss what we needed to do,” Hill said. “It was like one day, he’s not here, and everything has to run as normal.”

Hill was a natural choice as interim chief, he said, because he was already managing much of the upstairs office.

“I was already up here in the same office with Bresnan, so by putting me here, they didn’t disrupt the manpower and staffing on the field,” he said.

Over half of a year into being interim chief, Hill said he’s getting the hang of it — but with a fire department full of people who enjoy their jobs, Hill said it’s not too hard.

LOOKING AHEAD

In his new role as chief, Hill looks forward to implementing a fitness program at HFD, he said. This will establish a fitness standard for the firefighters, and there will be an annual fitness check. He got the idea for the program from when he worked part-time firefighting in Center Point. They had a similar program there.

“It was nice to have the accountability knowing that everyone else was going to have to at least meet a minimum standard,” Hill said. “You didn’t have a person on the firetruck with you who couldn’t climb a ladder.”

From the moment a firefighter receives a call that there is a fire, his or her physical fitness comes into play. They throw on their firefighting gear and run to the fire engine. If they’re the first one on the scene, they have to pull the hose while wearing the heavy, hot gear.

“Then you throw in the stress of the situation and the adrenaline,” Hill said. “You need to be able to function in that environment. That’s what exercise does. It teaches you to work with your heart rate elevated, with all of your muscles working and the adrenaline pumping through your veins.”

Some firefighters have cardiac arrests while on the scene, Hill said, because they might not have kept themselves in good cardiac condition.

“Dragging a hose full of water through a house that’s on fire is just hard work,” he said. “This program will be good for anyone who wants to be good at this job.”

Hill also wants to expand HFD’s training. The department’s ISO rank is 1, and Hill said this is the best rating a department can get.

“To keep it, we’re going to have to do a lot of training,” he said. “I’d like to get some mutual aid agreements with other municipalities that can help us maintain that ISO rating. Plus, that means we have to train with them, which would give us more training opportunities that we don’t currently have.”

If a neighboring city needs help, Homewood’s firefighters can respond to the call. This has always been the case, Hill said, but the neighboring departments haven’t trained with HPD on a regular basis.

“We could train with different people and get some new ideas,” he said. “It would give us more opportunities.”

Last, Hill said he knows he wants to also establish career path standards across the board for the firefighters.

“They could know, ‘Hey, if you want to get promoted, these are the things you have to do,’” he said.

LOVING THE JOB

Throughout the past three decades at HFD, Hill said he has enjoyed making memories with his coworkers. Firefighting is much different from being a police officer, he said — firefighters have to work as a team.

“The camaraderie is what makes being a firefighter so fun,” Hill said. “Police officers have a camaraderie, but they work solo. They’re alone a lot. In the fire department, we do everything together.

“Everything you do is done as a team. You don’t succeed or fail independently. You succeed or fail together.”

They laugh together, too. Whenever a rookie firefighter comes on the team, the old-timers will tell him or her to go find the hose stretcher. Of course, there’s no such thing as a hose stretcher.

“I think [Bresnan] asked if I knew where the hose stretcher was, and I laughed,” Hill said. “I told him, ‘My dad’s been a firefighter for 30 years, and I knew there wasn’t a hose stretcher.’”

Although many of Hill’s friends have retired over the years, he said he has enjoyed getting to know some of the “new guys,” too.

“Being at the firehouse and being with the firefighters, that’s always been enjoyable to me.”