It took only one inspection to remind Tom Andrews how long Emporia had been without a fire marshal.
“On the first day-care inspection I did, for Emporia Day Care, Deb Crowl said ‘We have been trying to get someone to come here all year and we haven’t been able to,’” Andrews said. “So we probably were starting to back up.”
It’s not that inspections hadn’t been happening — several firefighters are trained in the area. But without a fire marshal to coordinate and catalog those inspections, things can get behind. And for about a year, largely for budget reasons, Emporia has been without a fire marshal.
Not anymore. Andrews officially started on the job Jan. 1. Unofficially, he’s been playing catch-up since late October, getting all the stacked-up paperwork entered into the system.
“When I started toward the end of October entering inspections, they went back to June,” Andrews said in a Friday interview. “I got caught up by the end of last week — Jan. 12.”
That was while keeping up with his other duties as a full-time firefighter. Andrews joined the Emporia Fire Department in 1985. At the time, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Somewhere along the way, he found it.
Even then, he was doing inspections. He liked the chance to meet people and talk with them. But through most of those 25 years, Andrews never wanted the fire marshal’s job.
The reason was simple. He’d fallen in love with the shift work at the fire department — three days of 24-hour duty at the station, followed by four days off. The fire marshal, by contrast, works 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week.
But when the chance came around in 2006, Andrews found himself getting a little curious.
“I’d done that (routine) for 21 years,” Andrews said. “And so when the department put out that they were going to reinstate the fire marshal’s position, I decided I was ready for a change.”
It did take some adjustments at home. His wife also works, so he’d been preparing supper four nights a week on his time off.
“That first week,” Andrews said, breaking off with a laugh. “We thought she’d do the suppers now for most of the time and that didn’t work out so good.”
Everything’s back in balance now. Meanwhile, his day job is everything he could ask: inspecting businesses, investigating fires, working with the firefighters and the public at large. With more than 2,000 businesses in town to inspect, there’s even a bit of variety. And if manpower is thin and the need is great, Andrews can still muster with the rest of the department for a fire call.
Andrews is a lot of things these days. But bored is not one of them.
“For me, it’s kind of nice because it’s something different every day, which I’m enjoying,” he said.