A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Firefighter Blazes Trails on the Computer

Sometimes, at about 1 in the morning, Glendale Fire Capt. Corey Creasey would wake up at his computer with a piece of paper stuck in his face.

“I ran a lot of late hours,” said Creasey, who over the past four years has overseen the creation of a new Glendale Fire Department computer system. “The guys used to play tricks on me.”

They would prop up pieces of paper near his face as a friendly notice that he’d been caught sleeping. Sometimes, as a joke, after he dozed off for a minute, he’d wake up with the lights off, or maybe some pillows thrown into the room. Once, someone attached a rest bar to the computer screen to catch his head.

Sometimes, his computer screen was rigged to look like important files had been trashed or altered. That’s expected in a station house.

“Every firehouse becomes a family,” said Creasey, a 16-year veteran. “It’s a relationship you develop when you are with the same people for 24 hours at a time.”

Because he sees the Fire Department as a team, Creasey tries to downplay his own role with the computer system. He quickly points out, for example, how others did the legwork in gathering and entering information.

“He’s very humble about the product he’s been able to produce,” said Battalion Chief Steve Howard, who credits Creasey’s innovative work for saving the department thousands of dollars. He has set up a system to keep track of everything from hazardous materials to supplies for the station house and maintenance of fire engines.

“The impact has been tremendous for us,” Howard said.

Four years ago, Creasey--then captain of the hazardous materials team--knew little about computers. The team needed to create a fire prevention and inspection database that would keep track of hazardous materials stored by businesses. But no such software existed and hiring a programmer to design it would be very costly.

“The thing about firefighters is they love puzzles,” said Creasey, who volunteered to help. He would spend hours or days trying to understand a function, only to discover a couple of keystrokes could have saved him the trouble. Fighting sleep and often being pulled away on calls, he learned the lessons the hard way.

“That just made you hungry to figure it out,” Creasey said.

At least the problems only happened on a computer screen, and not in a fireball explosion, as happened at a medical supply company two years ago.

Creasey was the first captain on the scene as firefighters deployed throughout the building, unaware of pressurized oxygen tanks. They barely got out before three explosions ripped through the building.

“It was white fire,” Creasey said. “God was watching us that day.”

But then the firefighters immediately went back to work. “One minute they feel invincible,” Creasey said. “The next minute they have to face the fact they could have died, and then get back into it.”

The incident sums up for Creasey much of the determination and resourcefulness of the firefighter.

“My heart is definitely to be out there on the line,” said Creasey, now halfway through a two-year assignment organizing supplies and maintenance and continuing to work with the computer system. “But I know this is just as important as being out there.”

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