“Firefighting is a fascinating job”
George Beaulieu on the changes over the years
Over the course of the 43 years he worked as a firefighter George Beaulieu saw significant changes take place in his own career and in the world of fire prevention and control. Between 1965 and 2007, he went from a part-time volunteer in Lennoxville to chief of Sherbrooke’s Division 6 and dealing with everything from fenderbenders to flaming infernos in the process.
“Firefighting is a fascinating job,” Beaulieu said, describing a career that involved constantly learning new and better ways to keep people safe. Although his time as a firefighter began with training on the most basic fundamentals of the work with an officer from the Quebec Government, the former chief explained that skills and techniques were build up in various training courses across Eastern Canada and the United States over the years.
Among the things that Beaulieu said he saw develop over his time were standard operating practices like organizing on-call teams under lieutenants but also changes to firefighting culture, like allowing women to become firefighters.
Thinking back on the greatest lesson he learned, the former chief said that he came to understand over the years that the safety of his team was the first priority. “It took a while, after I joined, to realize that,” Beaulieu said, explaining that he took the task of ensuring that the team stayed safe upon himself in later years. “If the base burned down so be it.”
Larger fire departments today have a safety officer specifically dedicated to this task, he added, explaining that pushing a team too far can put more lives in danger.
“You’ve got to rotate, you can’t just strap on another bottle of air,” he said. “You’ve got to give them a rest.”
It is clearly a message that Beaulieu took to heart, as he could recall only a handful of minor injuries amongst his men over the 43 years leading up to his retirement in 2007.
“I had a great gang,” he reflected, explaining that what started as a small force with not much equipment gradually learned how to be a collaborative team with great response times.
Although Beaulieu shared a feeling that the Lennoxville department ended up in a good place, he was also clear that there were bumps in the road to get there.
“We had to push one truck to a garage once so it could get some gas,” he said “You can’t have that in a fire department, you have to be ready to get called out any time, night or day, and do the job.”
Similarly, he said that the idea of working in teams that rotate being on call came from one summer day when “we had more fireman in North Hatley eating ice cream than we had in Lennoxville.”
By the time he retired, Beaulieu was working as a permanent part-time employee of the city of Sherbrooke and paid an hourly wage. This, he said, was another thing that changed considerably from the start of his career to its end.
“In 1965, if you had a fire you could put out in 10 minutes, you got $2,” he said. “If it took you 10 hours to put it out, you got $2.”
That, the former chief said, is just a part of the job for a volunteer firefighter Being paid only while at fires, all the men had other jobs that they would dash out of when they got “the call.”
For the owner of Beaulieu’s grocery store on the corner of what was then Belvedere and Queen Streets, it was a matter of running down the road.
“To run from the store to the garage you had to be in pretty good shape,” Beaulieu said, remembering that he once locked a shopper inside the store on his way out the door by accident. “He wasn’t too happy when I got back,” the retired firefighter said, adding, “Our businesses came first, but when you got the call, you had to go.”
Asked about his most memorable experience on the job, Beaulieu looked back to the summer of 1995 when a train of propane cars derailed behind where Peps restaurant used to be.
“A propane car is never empty, they take all they can get out,” he said, explaining that the fire chief at the time was out of town that day and coordinating the response fell to him. That day, he said, involved not only evacuating a large section of the town, but also finding the right equipment to burn off the leftover propane inside the tanks while keeping them from overheating in the summer sun.
Perhaps not surprising in a person who committed so much of his life to the task, Beaulieu is passionate about the role of the firefighter. That role, however, goes beyond the job of simply fighting fires.
“A small town and the men who live there, that’s what a fire department is,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to rescue cats, but we rescued cats. We did a lot of stuff for people.”
That element of “doing stuff for people” is where Beaulieu’s pride for the work of the department overlaps with his pride for the work of the Lennoxville Volunteer Firemen’s Association
“What the association wanted to do, basically, was do some training on our own, and also raise some money for equipment,” he said, adding that the work came to form the backbone of the connection between the department and the community through a variety of outreach and fundraising activities.