More Women Battle Blazes, Break Barriers

After strapping on a 50-pound vest, Julie Pisanello reeled in a fire hose, hoisted two ladders, whacked a sledgehammer a dozen times against a simulated door crawled through a dark maze and dragged a 165-pound mannequin 70 feet.

The substitute schoolteacher is already a volunteer firefighter in suburban Albany. To join the 98 women who earn their livelihoods from firefighting in New York -- a state with 20,000 career firefighters -- she needs to demonstrate on-the-job dexterity.

“It’s so difficult!” Pisanello, 21, said with a gasp midway through an eight-station course set aside especially for female hopefuls on a fall weekend at the Academy of Fire Science. “Keep going! You are so close, girl!” shot back an instructor.

It was when Pisanello came to the final event -- wielding a pike and hook atop a 6-foot-long pole to simulate pulling down a ceiling in a burning building -- that she almost buckled.

“If she even drops that pole, she’ll fail,” said Fire Lt. Donna Kubarycz, watching nearby.

In an attempt to broaden a field still dominated by men, the main firefighter’s union helped develop a Candidate Physical Ability Test in 1999 that reflects not just brute strength but strictly job-related demands.

Pisanello was not disqualified. But she did not finish fast enough -- she was about four minutes over the test’s cutoff time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds.

But she came away encouraged.

She is working to build her strength and endurance through inline skating, swimming, running and weightlifting, and improve her technique by regularly tackling hands-on drills at her volunteer fire station. She is confident she’ll be a full-time firefighter someday.

That would land her in rare company. Of the 275,000-plus career firefighters in America, about 6,500, 2.4%, are women. There were none in 1972. About 40,000 women serve as volunteer firefighters.

“Is it small because it’s only 2% or big because we’ve increased 50%” in a decade? asked Terese Floren, co-founder of Women in the Fire Service, a research group in Madison, Wis. “People have to make that call for themselves.”

The third annual training camp at the Academy of Fire Science here drew 200 women, from volunteers practicing entry-level tests to professionals getting training in arson detection, hazardous materials and emergency responses to ice rescues and terrorist attacks.

The state-sponsored sessions at a converted, Civil War-era college campus in the rustic Finger Lakes region broke ground, bringing together female firefighters from across New York. “There was no forum for them to ever get to know each other,” said Jackaline Ring of the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control.

Similar programs to bolster the female ranks have since been tried in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Fraternal groups within professional fire departments also are striving to create recruitment, training and mentoring programs that better prepare women who want to join.

Although some cities have broken the pattern -- at least one in seven firefighters in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Madison, Wis., is female -- many others have nearly all-male forces. Of New York City’s 11,500 firefighters, 26 are women.

The barriers begin with tradition -- one of the most physically demanding jobs retains a fiercely male culture -- and female trailblazers who cracked the shell a generation ago have failed to win a transformation in many places.

“It all depends on who’s running things,” said Kubarycz, 45, who in 1987 became the first female career firefighter in Rochester, N.Y. “A lot of times you try to get things going and, if you don’t have backing from the important higher-ups, it doesn’t get anywhere.”

On one side is stiff competition -- “there are so many qualified men” -- but perhaps harder is getting word out to women “that this is a viable option,” said Kubarycz, a bodybuilder steered into firefighting by a friend.

The test offered by the Washington-based International Assn. of Fire Fighters, which mimics the sequential order of battling a fire, “is not only standardized but fair” in assessing physical ability, said Rich Duffy, an association official. Its use must be accompanied by recruiting and mentoring programs aimed at increasing diversity “both in gender and ethnicity,” he said.

A few dozen women lining up on the grounds of the cademy roared their approval as each one progressed through the course, which begins with three minutes on a stair-climbing machine.

“Firefighting is a challenging job that not many people are willing to do,” said Pisanello, still panting after her workout. “They can’t fake it.”

If men have stronger torsos, “women may have stronger legs,” said Christa Lombardo, 29, a fire captain’s daughter who joined Buffalo’s department in 1995. “Guys can put a lot of oomph into it. The women, it may take a little more technique.”

Although Lombardo “practically grew up” in a fire station, “if you don’t pull your weight, they don’t care who you are,” she said. “You have to test men and women equally. There’s differences in body types and mechanics, but the job is still the job.”

Often, her female colleagues find themselves scattered in various firehouses, so the women-only weekend is a rare chance to get together.

“We hang out, we talk, we discuss,” Lombardo said. “The guys do it, we can do it.”

“I see some women who are very discouraged within their own fire department,” said the academy’s director, Richard Nagle. “They’re accepted because they have to be accepted, not because they are considered to be equal in their abilities.

“The men have to say, ‘Yes, there are women who can do the job and I wouldn’t mind trusting my safety to a female the same way I would to a male.’ ”

The union test is required throughout New York. Rather than considering anyone who passes, however, some career fire departments like New York City’s draw up hiring lists weighted in favor of those who score highest on both written and physical tests.

“People should be judged on their ability to do the job and not anything else,” said Nagle, a retired FDNY lieutenant. He expects “a couple of generations” will pass before there are substantial numbers of female firefighters.