Change all part of the game for retiring fire chief
McKearney served for close to four decades, witnessed evolution of fire, rescue services
Kids still get wide-eyed when a fire truck pulls up.
“I will miss that,” retiring Vancouver fire chief John McKearney said. “The little girls and the little guys, they beam. It’s a special feeling, time and time and time again, it really does show what our responsibility is to our citizens.
“That’s the type of mentoring you can do for a child, and it helps us always remember we’re held to a higher bar, to high esteem, and we should never forget that, never take it for granted.”
McKearney is retiring in June after eight years as chief.
His successor is Darrell Reid, who has been CEO of the Heart and Stroke Foundation in Ottawa.
Children’s fascination aside, today’s Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services would be almost unrecognizable to McKearney when he joined his hometown fire department 37 years ago.
“When I think about our firefighters today, we’ve changed as to who should be a firefighter,” McKearney said.
“When I got hired, it was mostly athletes. You had to have demonstrated being a team member.”
Also, firefighters — pretty much exclusively firemen — stayed to themselves, he said. They got their budget, they responded to calls.
“We didn’t much do anything else.”
Today, they race to car-crash sites and are stretched thin responding to opioid overdoses — 20 to 25 a day by the No. 2 hall in the Downtown Eastside, alone. Or, as McKearney put it: “A tsunami that is still growing.”
The department has fire boats, a hazardous materials response team, a confined-space rescue team — in short a workforce of skilled people who handle multiple types of emergencies.
It’s no surprise, then, the makeup of the 825-strong force has come a long way from being comprised mostly of white jocks. Today the department needs people who speak the various languages spoken around Vancouver, people who grew up in the city’s diverse neighbourhoods, more women.
“It’s been an evolution over the past 20 years,” McKearney said. “Really, what we are is a civilian army.”
The outgoing chief saw his share of horror, things that can’t be erased: Toddlers who couldn’t be resuscitated, burn victims whose skin fell off. In the day, no one had heard of post-traumatic stress.
“Back then, you’d mask it with black humour, probably drinks, that sort of thing.”
But McKearney has also seen more than his share of heroes, too many to count, swinging from ropes or lashing ladders together or whatever it took to save lives.
He and his wife Debbie will enjoy the summer at their place on Keats Island, hang out with their three grandchildren when they get the opportunity.
Then McKearney, who turns 60 in September, will begin looking for a job again, something unrelated to fire.
“I am looking for the next adventure,” he said.