Editor's note: This article is the first in a series following recruits through the San Mateo County Fire Academy.

By Dwana Simone Bain
Staff Reporter

Thirty-three recruits. Eighty-four days. Four-hundred-eighty hours that could alter the course of their careers. This is the San Mateo County Recruit Fire Academy.
After enduring a hiring process that lasts months -- sometimes years -- just 12 weeks remain before graduation and full-time firefighting. But even now, there are no guarantees.
"This is the point to find out whether people can do it or not," said academy administrator Don Dornell. For reasons ranging from claustrophobia to inability to master the skills, some attrition occurs in every academy. "If they can't do the job, they're not going to graduate," Dornell said. "If they don't graduate from the academy they're not going to be employed."
Recruit Jane Hunt said she understands the need for high standards. "I want to be the best firefighter I can be because what happens out there is important with people's lives," she said. "When it comes down to it, people's lives are on the line and you have to be good at what you do. There's not an option ... to be average."
Hunt added, "The beautiful thing is that I'm surrounded by people at the academy who want to do exactly the same thing as I do."
Through written and physical testing, the recruits have proven they have the ability to become firefighters. Now they must learn the skills.
Within days of joining the academy, they will have learned to wear their firefighter gear -- weighing more than 50 pounds -- as a second skin, despite the sweltering summer weather that will soon envelop the Bay Area.
Over the next 12 weeks, the recruits will learn to rescue accident victims from cliffs and extract injured victims from smashed vehicles. They will learn wildfire fighting techniques -- including advancing hose up an 800-foot hillside -- and learn to respond to hazardous material spills. And of course, they will learn to fight fires -- including house, car and commercial fires -- in all their forms.
Of the hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of applicants who begin the testing process, only a few dozen make it this far. Through a combination of persistence and skill, the 33 recruits -- 29 men, four women -- in this spring's academy are fortunate. They've ascended above all candidates, and have landed jobs among the county's 18 fire departments.
"These people have been competing against each other for a long time," said Dornell. Now the time for competition is over, From here on, the academy is a team. Dornell tells them, "You don't know each other, but you're sitting with your best friend."
Though they have arrived with a common goal, each has traveled a unique path to this career. For some, the job is a fulfillment of a perceived destiny, for others, the decision to pursue firefighting was a sudden revelation.

Fulfilling his destiny
Like many young men, Steven Rohrer hoped to become a firefighter.
But unlike many of his peers, Rohrer, now 31, also has a family legacy to continue. Rohrer is a third-generation San Mateo County firefighter. His grandfather worked 25 years in San Mateo, his father, 30 years in Menlo Park.
Even with his career seemingly chosen for him, for several years Rohrer took a different route to success. "Although I had talked about it ever since I was 18 years old, one of the things that had hindered my father [a captain] toward the end of his career ... was in order to become a battalion chief or division chief you needed a bachelor's degree," Rohrer said.
Knowing a degree would help him in any career, after high school Rohrer continued to college, eventually graduating from Sacramento State with a Business Administration degree. After graduation he intended to take a year off, but was offered a promotion at his job. Further promotions followed.
"My resume was building in leaps and folds," said Rohrer, who eventually became a district sales manager for Sleep Train mattress centers, responsible for eight stores.
"I actually opened up the entire Bay Area market," he said. Rohrer spent years caught up in the good money and comfortable atmosphere of the business. He married and started a family, and had become a suburban success story.
But in 1998, as he approached his 10-year anniversary with the company, Rohrer said something compelled him to change course. "I was creeping up on 30 years old," he said. "I ... really reflected what I wanted to do for a career ... If I'm going to act on what I wanted to do since I was a kid, I better do it now."
He began studying fire science at the College of San Mateo, but he know getting a job with a fire department takes a long time. He took the written test three times. "The first time I took it I didn't even pass it," Rohrer said. He passed in his second attempt, "But it wasn't anywhere near a qualifying score to get an interview."
Only the top scorers are invited back for a quick screening interview, said Dornell, who's also an assistant fire chief in Burlingame. "We hire the best of the best."
Rohrer was one of the lucky ones, according to Dornell. Many candidates take the written test at least five and sometimes more than 50 times.
"I had a lot of great coaches to help me get to where I got as quick as I did," Rohrer acknowledged.
Before landing a position in Menlo Park, Rohrer spent a year as a cadet for the department, "which is pretty much an interview everyday."
Rohrer has already had firefighter training through a pre-service academy and through his community college courses. However, "What I had learned before was just the tip of it," he said. "Now they're going much more in-depth."
Rohrer expected a grueling 12 weeks and said, "It definitely is physically challenging."
Yet he never doubts for a moment he will last the final stretch. "You can achieve anything you want to you just have to put your mind to it."

Living her dream
Until six years ago, Hunt -- one of just four female recruits in the academy -- had never imagined herself a firefighter.
Growing up in a close-knit community in Pittsburgh, Hunt followed her peers' path and went off to college. For a few years, she studied pre-med physical therapy at Ohio University, working summers and weekends as an administrative assistant.
After moving to California in 1990, she worked for a chiropractor and attended massage school before landing an administrative assistant job in the leasing division of a bank.
Then in 1995, Hunt met a firefighter who worked for the San Francisco Fire Department. "I liked the type of person that he was," she said. Over the next couple of years, Hunt met more and more firefighters. "These people literally just started falling into my life," she said. "I met a couple of women firefighters up here in the city that are just excellent individuals and phenomenal firefighters."
Hunt said she was impressed by her friends' reverence for their jobs. Suddenly, it became clear to Hunt that she too had a calling for a fire service career. "When I made the decision to do it I knew that's what I wanted to do the rest of my life," said Hunt, now 31 and hired by the Menlo Park Fire Department. "I've never known what I wanted to do before."
Hunt began asking her firefighter friends for advice on how to obtain her dream job.
She took the written test many times, for more than three years.
In 1999 joined the San Francisco Fire Department reserve programs and secured her Emergency Medical Technician certification that same year.
She studied rescue systems, and began working as a cadet for the Menlo Park Fire Department. She said her schedule was brutal, since she worked four days a week at her bank job. On Fridays, she put in a 24-hour shift at the fire station. On Saturdays, Sundays or both, she worked as an emergency room tech at a San Francisco hospital.
While juggling this schedule, Hunt attended a pre-service fire academy in autumn of 2000. In February, she dropped a day off her bank shift to add a 12-hour-per week internship with the Burlingame Fire Department. "When I do have something that I want very badly I will do whatever it takes to get there," she said of her intense schedule.
"It worked," she added. "I'm there."