By Kathy Cook Hunter
Ethan Hupp, 18, wants to help people and thinks he has found the perfect way to do it. After volunteering as a cadet with Drake’s Crossing Fire Department since he was 13, he’s decided to make firefighting his career.
“My dad (Jan Hupp) actually was a volunteer around there for eons,” said Hupp, remembering his father reacting to the beeps of the fire department pager. “He kind of picked it up from my grandpa, who helped start Drake’s Crossing Fire Department in the ’60s and was the assistant chief at one time.”
After graduating from Silverton High School in June Hupp began working halftime at the Aurora Fire Department while he attends Chemeketa Community College in Salem.
Growing up in the Drake’s Crossing neighborhood, where a fire station is similar to a community center, it seemed natural to join the station’s cadet program, which he did for more than four years.
“We would go to a weekly drill, clean up the station and grounds and do some maintenance,” he said. “After I was in the program for six months I was tested on some basics and assigned to help the paramedics.”
“The point of it was to interest young people in community service and get them out in the community, and also help them think about a future career,” he said. “It’s a growing trend but kind of unique in our area.”
Since Drake’s Crossing depends on volunteers to serve its community as well as Silver Falls State Park and Longview Fibre’s woodlands, its cadet program helps with volunteer recruitment and retention by providing experience.
His cadet jobs included taking medical notes while paramedics did their work, getting medical supplies, running errands at an emergency and occasionally holding a hose. “It had to be beyond a fire,” Hupp said. “We were not allowed to get close.”
Hupp’s senior project was creating a website for Drake’s Crossing Fire Department.
Nowadays, the intern is firefighting. “I’m a lot busier and can do a lot more,” he said. “At Aurora, although I’m a student, they look to me for certain things.”
At Chemeketa Hupp will study firefighting for 18 months and then enter into the basic emergency medical technician program for six to nine months. Having finished his first term, he’s taking a month’s break and catching up on his sleep.
He thought the community college course would be easy, but hasn’t found it so simple. “Chemeketa has one of the best firefighting programs in the country,” he said. Practicing from the firefighting tower on campus, pulling 24-hour duty and riding in a fire engine are all part of it.
The Salem and Marion County fire departments are involved in the training.
“We provide a service to them, and they provide us with experience,” Hupp said. “We’re actually learning what’s realistically out there. I’ve found there are three ways to learn this: the book, the college and what the ‘real’ guys tell us to do. It’s been interesting.”
Hupp also job-shadowed with a family friend at Clackamas Fire District’s Station 1.
“I kind of set my eyes on this goal through high school,” he said. “Then throughout my senior year I questioned whether I might want to be a flight nurse, so I examined the health occupation program at school. Firefighting interested me more.”
Hupp knows there’s danger in firefighting.
“You’re always cautious. I try to learn from examples of traumatic or fatal accidents,” he said. “I used to be an adrenaline junkie, but I’m not so much anymore. I’m used to it.
“Now I think more of somehow helping somebody, maybe even the tiniest bit. It’s the greatest thing in the world to me.”
