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Retiring fire chief recalls 3 decades of innovation
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Struthers Fire Chief Harold Milligan is retiring after 30 years. His last day at work will be Wednesday.
By Jeanne Starmack
Struthers
When Fire Chief Harold Milligan started with the city fire department in 1975, his protective equipment was a hat, coat, gloves and boots.
When he became chief in 1980, “hazardous material” was still just a term for whatever he encountered when he changed his daughter’s diaper.
Through the years to his first day of retirement Thursday, the mission on his job has remained the same: save lives and property.
But there were many changes those years brought, from equipment that now includes $2,000 suits to the first-responder EMS program he started to the Mahoning County Hazardous Materials Team he helped form with fellow fire chiefs Bob Tieche of Canfield and Andy Frost of Austintown.
Equipment innovations helped keep firefighters, who used to work without the more sophisticated protection, from dying later because they’d breathed in poisons.
“We were always in the coke plants draggin’ hose,” Milligan said.
The haz-mat team, which formed in 1989 after “years of working with 23 communities” to coordinate it, also made the job safer.
“In the 1970s and ’80s, you’d see these explosions and no one was protected,” he said. “Police would be the first ones on the scene, and they’d ride into a vapor cloud.”
Now, he said, there are guidebooks that indicate what substances are poisonous or flammable.
“Before, we didn’t know — it was, ‘Hey, there’s something leakin’,” he said.
While those changes were making the job safer for firefighters, the first-responder program made the odds better for victims. The change became necessary, Milligan said.
“We did basic first aid — there were no paramedics,” Milligan remembered, adding that people who were seriously injured were well-served by two-minute ambulance response times.
But when the city’s two ambulance companies expanded service into Youngstown, those response times increased to between 10 and 12 minutes, he said.
He started the first-responder program in 1992.
Now it’s time for Milligan to hang up his hat and coat, peel off his gloves — today, a pair costs $65 — and kick off his boots.
He’s helping new chief Gary Mudryk, sworn in Wednesday, learn his way around the office at the main fire station on Elm Street.
Milligan’s looking forward to retirement — “I don’t want to belong to anything, I don’t want to go to any meetings,” he said. “I wanna play golf, and go wherever I want whenever I want.”
But he’ll take with him a lot of memories, not the least of which is having to retrieve a dead mobster wrapped in duct tape out of an old landfill on Lowellville Road in the years before he became chief.
He’ll have his scrapbook of newspaper clippings, too, of the more memorable fires he helped fight.
There was the July 4, 1988, tire fire at CASTLO, when a million tires caught fire and burned for days as firefighters worked around the clock.
Then in August 1988, workers were using a saw to cut steel plating while putting new windows in an office at the Lyons Medical Supply Co. on Youngstown Poland Road. They went to lunch, not realizing that sparks from the saw had fallen behind paneling.
The resulting conflagration burned the company’s warehouses for blocks, while acetylene canisters and a huge propane tank at a nearby welding company became potential bombs.
They didn’t explode, but the fire left behind a mess of gauze and diapers amid the remains of a company that never rebuilt.
He’ll have those and plenty more stories to tell his grandchildren as he and his wife, Linda, visit with all eight of them.
Those laminated clippings in his scrapbook will tell the story of a profession that, he says, “is not for the faint of heart.”