By Maggie McNinch, Staff Writer
For some students, a normal evening after school involves various sports or instrumental practices. For others, they just go on home to relax. But four students at First Flight head in a slightly different direction: learning, training and volunteering to fight fires.
Juniors Conner Roberts, Tyler Roberts and Will Roepcke and senior Jake Pendergrass spend their time during weekdays and weekends helping at the Colington Volunteer Fire Department.
“I spend most of my time at the fire station,” Pendergrass said. “I’m there between two and seven hours a day.”
Their time spent at the station consists of taking classes and learning how to become a firefighter.
“The classes I’m currently taking are a series known simply as ‘Fire Academy,’ ” Conner said. “It’s just the basics of firefighting as well as a surface-level knowledge of basic medical care.”
All four students take similar classes outside of school. They have the choice to take over 20 firefighting classes, which would total more than 300 hours of class time. Most of these classes are taught in the evening, which means the students have plenty to deal with beyond math, science and English.
“I wake up at 7 a.m. to go to school, and I don’t get home until 11:30 p.m. or 12, and once I get home, I just sleep,” Tyler said.
With a day like that, it’s easy to imagine the experience would be pretty draining, but the students enjoy it and are each looking at firefighting as a possible career choice.
“I want to eventually become a paid firefighter, and I’m going through the state training to become paid out of high school,” Pendergrass said.
All the boys volunteer for different reasons. For Roepcke, whose dad is deputy chief for the Kill Devil Hills Fire Department, volunteering was an easy choice.
Deputy Chief Roepcke is pleased that his son is following in the footsteps of others in his family: “I’m proud. He’s the third generation of my family to volunteer as a firefighter, so it’s pretty cool.”
While Roepcke joined last December, the Roberts twins joined the following May out of general interest.
Pendergrass started training at the Southern Shores Volunteer Fire Department when he was 16, but living in Colington made it difficult for him to make it to the truck once it was dispatched, so he transferred to Colington.
Volunteering at the station is not just about taking classes – it’s also about responding to calls.
The boys own pagers that the station uses to contact them when someone calls about a fire. This means that no matter what time it is, they have to rush to the station in order to suit up and be on the truck in time to fight the fire.
“When I first got it, I was kind of confused on how to use it, which is pretty funny,” Tyler said with a chuckle. “Everyone was like, ‘Just show up when it starts beeping at you,’ but it does more things than just beep at you.”
Being on call can be nerve-racking for some, but Roepcke handles it well: “I’m used to it, just from the way I’ve grown up with it, with my dad, but it gets your heart pumping,” he said.
And though there is a fast-paced feeling that comes with firefighting, the boys agree that through the fire-calls and classes, many memories have been made.
“We had a fire where we had five guys fall into a pool,” Roepcke recalled.
Added Conner: “Climbing the aerial apparatus onto a roof, or blindly crawling through a smoke-filled room for training” were two interesting events.
While their volunteering is beneficial to the community, it helps the students personally as well.
“It gives them some idea of how things work in life and they get more than just school, they learn how organization and responsibility work,” Deputy Chief Roepcke said. “It’s a skill that can last their lifetime, and in a lot of places it’s a civic responsibility to volunteer because that’s all most places have in the country for firefighters.”
The hypothetical question – “Would you run into a burning building?” – is a very real scenario for these students. The choice to run into a burning building while others are running out takes a lot of courage, but that is something the Roberts twins, Roepcke and Pendergrass all have in spades.
Sophomore Maggie McNinch can be reached at 22mcninchma07@daretolearn.org.
