During his 29 years as a Barrie firefighter, Jeff Holmyard has made the city a safer place.
The fire prevention officer (FPO) is retiring from Barrie Fire and Emergency Service where he started in 1990 when he was 31 years old. Before that, he was a tradesperson, cabinet maker and brick layer.
“It was a career choice,” he says from Station No. 1 on Dunlop Street West. “I was a young father and I wanted something permanent, something I could count on and secure my future with.
“I never thought I’d be a firefighter. But they say you never find a career, your career finds you,” Holmyard adds with a smile that seems permanently etched on his face.
“There was an ad in the paper and I said to myself, ‘This is something I could do.’ But I was refused the first year and was insulted,” he says. “I said ‘How could you dare refuse me?’ But I got hired by three departments the next year: Toronto, Newmarket and Barrie, and I picked the one I wanted.
“Nobody from my family was a firefighter before I was and none of my three sons have followed in my footsteps.”
He was 10 years “on the trucks” with suppression firefighters and then had a motorcycle accident in 2001 when a vehicle ran a stop sign.
“I had just left the station and (the collision) just about destroyed my legs, but it forced me off the trucks and I became an inspector in 2002 doing public education, fire inspection, code enforcement, etc.,” Holmyard says.
It’s a great opportunity to meet people from all walks of life everyday, he adds.
“And not only do I have chance to make the public safer, I also have the opportunity, when I walk in into a building, to make it safer for firefighters, too,” Holmyard says. “Because I can see it from their standpoint. I can go into a building and I know what’s expected of the owners and the tenants, the fire inspectors and I know what’s expected of the firefighters.”
Keeping buildings safe is bit like preventative maintenance on a vehicle.
“People get complacent in their own homes; that’s where they feel the safest,” he says. “It’s been my dedicated effort after almost 20 years to try and prevent fires from ever starting. The best fire is the one that never happens.”
The biggest thing that has changed over his last 20 years as an FPO is building construction, Holmyard says.
“It is unfortunate now that our furnishings and home construction are such that everything burns up a whole lot faster than they used to,” he says. “There are so many synthetics in our homes — the chairs we’re sitting on right now are all petroleum products — that not only burn faster, they’re 10 times more toxic than Mother Nature’s materials.”
You’ve got less than a minute to get out of your house during a fire, Holmyard says.
“Practising a fire drill in your own home is paramount. You have so little time to evacuate when the heat is generated at 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit in a minute,” he says. “When you think the boiling temperature of water is 212 Farenheit, you don’t have a lot of time in that minute.
“And it’s not just the heat; it’s the poison. There’s enough poison in a pair of running shoes to kill an entire family.”
Holmyard says he’s had a friendly relationship with almost all of the people he’s been in contact with over the years during home and business inspections.
“As an inspector, I feel like I may have almost created a little community in my district. I would rather work with people than come in as an enforcer against them,” he says.
Twenty years ago, fire prevention was all face-to-face communication, but hammering home the message now is very difficult, he adds.
“With all the social media, it’s not always easy to get the message through, and when you do, it’s gone the next moment,” Holmyard says. “Social media is good for getting the message out, but it’s so fleeting. It’s about attention span. It’s very difficult to get anybody’s attention for more than a few minutes.”
Holmyard has a workshop in the basement and still does the occasional brickwork and small jobs. He also plans to (what else?) do some fire-prevention consulting.
Working with his fellow firefighters has been extremely rewarding, he says.
“Teamwork is everything. The whole idea of being able to help out people in the community and work as a team really appealed to me,” Holmyard says. “They get a sense of reward from helping others.
