Vancouver Fire Chief Joe Molina is retiring from his post after steering the department through a tumultuous decade, one that saw gutting Recession-era cutbacks, a slow recovery and major changes in how firefighters do their jobs.
Well, technically he’s retiring. He announced his retirement a year ago, and he won’t actually leave his post for another four months. But still — retirement is imminent. Now he just needs to figure out what to do with himself after he passes the (safely) lit torch to his successor.
“I think I’m going to try to see what not working looks like. I’ve been working since I was 16,” Molina said, sitting in his office at Fire Station 5 on Friday. “It’ll be interesting to see how much of this job is part of me.”
The space is decorated with memorabilia from his 28-year career. A photo of Molina with George W. Bush, smiling at the then-president’s ranch, hangs on the wall. The chief’s old helmet from his first firefighting job in Waco, Texas, is propped on a shelf, looking a little worse for the wear.
Molina, 57, started his firefighting career at 30 years old. He’d just gotten out of the military with his brother, and both had decided to go out for the police academy. But an ad in the local newspaper caught Molina’s eye — they were hiring firefighters in the Waco department, and he decided to give that a shot instead.
It was 1992 in Texas. Firefighting practices were influenced less by rigorous research than by a hotshot cowboy culture.
“When I started, the house was on fire — you pull the line off your truck and kick the door in,” Molina said. “You’d come out and your helmet would be melted.”
It was exciting, he added, but it was also wildly risky, especially considering long-term risks like exposure to carcinogens.
He recalled the first fire of his career on his third-ever shift. They’d rolled up to an Oriental rug factory fully engulfed in flames and charged in. The roof collapsed, sending half the responding firefighters to the hospital. The remaining crew helped dig their colleagues out of the rubble without using respirators.
“There’s all these dyes, carpet dyes, so the smoke was purple, and green. The forklifts were exploding, the propane tanks were exploding,” Molina said. After his inaugural fire, Molina said he remembers turning to a crewmember, who chose an opportune time to mess with the new guy.
“I remember asking him, ‘Jeez, are they all like this?’ He said, ‘No, sometimes they’re really hard,'” Molina said with a laugh. “I thought about giving him my badge right there.”
He didn’t. Instead, he spent the next 15 years rising through the ranks in Waco. He eventually hit a professional wall and got bored, casting around for a new challenge. He saw a posting for Vancouver.
“I said, where’s that? I thought that was Canada,” Molina said. He came up to visit in October 2007. “They hooked me with the weather. It was awesome. They hooked me, and I came up here, just in time for the recession.”
Riding out the recession
Molina was brought on as deputy chief of the Vancouver Fire Department in January 2008, just before the economy took a nosedive that would gut public programs across the country.
“As soon as I got here, there were signs that things were about to get bad,” Molina said. He was attending a groundbreaking ceremony for Fire Station 10 when the city’s chief financial officer leaned over to ask an alarming question.
“He said, ‘Is there any way you could open up the station without any new people?'”
It got much worse. The department would all but eliminate its fire marshal personnel, the people who did the bulk of the work on fire prevention and investigation, and slashed administrative staff.
“It was rough. I look back on it and wonder how we survived,” Molina said.
The chief at the time retired, handing Molina the reins in February 2011. One of his first acts as chief was closing Fire Station 6 and eliminating 13 people. This time, the literal roof wasn’t falling on Molina’s head, but it sure felt like it.
It also taught him how to stay calm in the eye of the storm, a lesson that he says helped him for the remainder of his career.
“Especially back then, it was easy to get overwhelmed if you just stopped and thought too much, because of just where we were. Don’t panic. We’ll get through this, we’ve got good people, good assistance, good training. The calls keep coming in,” Molina said.
The economy, of course, would recover. Fire Station 6 reopened with the assistance of a FEMA grant, which provided three years of funding while local leadership was able to build up their operating funds with a boost from local sales taxes.
And now, Vancouver is staring at a whole new comprehensive package of new services and revenues, called A Stronger Vancouver, which would replace two fire stations and renovate three others.
“I just try to coach folks: Be steady. Keep your eye on the ball,” Molina said.
Replacement search
Molina told City Manager Eric Holmes in March 2019 that he was ready to retire by the end of the year, he said. That deadline was extended by an additional six months, and city leaders put out a formal job posting earlier this month.
His successor, he hopes, will be open to embracing the changes that many municipal fire departments have been working toward. Molina said his department has been shifting toward a more comprehensive data-driven approach that puts less stock in initial response times. It’s more critical to put overall outcomes under a microscope, he said.
“How often did we keep the fire to the room of origin? That’s a thing we can measure. How often did we keep the fire to the building of origin?” Molina said. “We’re still this day working at data more, just to get better and better at it.”
He’s also pushing for better prevention practices, a campaign he hopes his successor will embrace. No matter how fast a firefighting unit gets, it’ll never beat the response time of an in-home sprinkler.
“A lot of things have changed,” Molina said. “You have to make risk-benefit decisions. That’s something that’s changed a lot since ’92, when you’d just show up and, ‘Woo! Grab the hose!'”
