THE FIRE WALL

feel like you’re taking a spot they’re entitled to.”

Lisa Forrest, the first Black woman battalion chief in Philadelphia’s department, recalled the hostility that greeted her arrival on the job in 2004. The 39-year-old Forrest faced a third challenge in addition to her race and gender, standing just 4-feet10 and weighing less than 100 pounds when she entered the fire academy.

She recalls the initial reaction to her arrival in the ranks of the City of Brotherly Love’s male firefighters: “Who is this girl, and where did she come from?”

Forrest, the mother of two, recalled the complaints from firefighters’ wives about a woman sleeping in the firehouse with their husbands and the cold-shoulder treatment from their spouses in a department that remains 95% male.

“I got the dirty looks and some people didn’t talk to me,” she recalled. “Some people had a personal agenda: Here it is, you’ve got this woman on the job. But I was there to do a job, and everybody doesn’t love me.”

While she initially planned to spend five years with the Philly department while pursuing a nursing degree, Forrest instead found a home without giving an inch. Late last year, she was promoted to her current job.

“I don’t even know when the turning point was,” she recalled. “I can’t tell you. I was just being me, and I wasn’t waiting for their approval. I was finally told by some of the biggest male chauvinists, ‘I’d crawl down a hallway with you any day.’ ”

Washington was honored by legendary civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) in 2019, marking the 10-year anniversary of her rise to the top of the Decatur department. But she finds people still struggle with the idea of a woman in charge.

“People call and ask to speak with the fire chief,” she said. “I say, ‘Speaking.’ And they say, ‘No, I want to speak to THE fire chief.’

“That’s me.”