BROOKINGS — But for a change of heart, Brookings might never have had Fire Chief Pete Bolzer, and he might very well have become involved in a very different kind of firefighting.

“I always wanted to be a soldier — I’m an adrenaline junkie, and that’s kind of why I wanted to do that,” Bolzer, 66, said, recalling his childhood growing up during the Vietnam War era in an interview with the Brookings Register. “Well, then as I get older and closer to draft age, I go, ‘Well, this is a really dumb idea.’” — he chuckles a little bit — “‘Maybe I don’t want to do that.’ So I had to find something to fill that adrenaline void, and it just happened to be firefighting.”

He started his firefighting career — as in battling wildland fires and such, not engaging in combat with enemy troops — as a volunteer in 1979 in Martin, his hometown in southwest South Dakota just a little north of the Nebraska border. Now, 45 years later in 2024, he is retiring, with his last day as Brookings fire chief being Dec. 31.

“It still has that adrenaline rush every once and a while, it’s just now I’m getting older and it’s getting difficult to function at peak capacity that I wish I could function at,” Bolzer said.

His decades-long career took him to several places, including his first paid job as a fire captain with the city of Lead. From there, he joined the South Dakota State Fire Marshal’s Office, where he served as a deputy state fire marshal for 12 years, spending time in Mitchell and Pierre. He also served as a volunteer firefighter in those communities.

It wasn’t until 1999 that Bolzer landed in Brookings, when he accepted the then-new position of deputy fire chief, being the first to fill it. Fast forward to today, he’s the chief, having earned the title, and responsibilities thereof, in June 2021.

“(There’s) a lot of good memories. In the past, I’ve met a lot of different people around the country, around Brookings County,” he said. “This position has afforded me the opportunity to travel and do a lot of training and meet a lot of big names in the industry.”

Bolzer touched on a variety of topics during his interview with the Register, ranging from a local shortage of volunteers to fire incidents that can’t be forgotten to how firefighting has changed over the years and much more.

‘I remember every last one of them’

Some fires are never truly extinguished in the sense that a firefighter will always carry the burden of the memories and emotions from those blazes. Bolzer knows this first-hand, but the ones he remembers aren’t necessarily what you’d think.

“There’s a lot of them that stick out in my mind, and sometimes it’s a little difficult to relay to people why,” he said, his tone reflective. “People think, ‘OK, it’s the great big huge fires and large monetary losses that you remember.’ A lot of times, it’s the small, seemingly mundane ones — rescue calls, fires, whatever — that I remember, because something significant happened.”

He paused, then continued, “In the past 45 years, I’ve dealt with a lot of fire fatalities — I remember every last one of them. Things like that stick with you. There’s certain accidents, because of the circumstances and ages of the victims, those stay with you — those are the ones I remember.”

Mental health an ever-present concern

To say that being a firefighter — or being part of any emergency response organization, really — is stressful is an understatement.

“It takes a big mental toll. For years … we’ve been studying the suicide problem among emergency responders. Even to this day we don’t even know how big the problem is because there’s no reporting system for that. The statistics that we have are basically garnered from news reports,” Bolzer said. “Yearly, it’s just becoming a bigger and bigger problem.”

That mental toll also means there are likely times a firefighter might not be open when they’re faced with a specific question.

“There are certain things that a firefighter will dance around and never tell you as a member of the general public,” Bolzer said. “They’re probably never going to tell you the worst call they’ve ever been on because it’s kind of a secretive thing for them. It’s something that they don’t like to share, even though talking about it helps, they don’t like to share it because it’s a personal thing. They feel that the public won’t understand what they go through.”

There’s hope, though, as society begins to grapple with the challenges of mental anguish, and it’s something welcomed by the fire chief.

“The state legislature has been appropriating money for mental health for emergency responders the last couple of years,” Bolzer explained. “The federal government has been appropriating money and providing some assistance. The city is extremely good when it comes to the mental health of emergency responders. So the help is there.”

Still, “I’ve always hated to see people leave the profession because of issues like that — but I’d rather have them leave than take their own life.”

Not your grandfather’s firefighting

On its surface, battling a blaze seems pretty basic: Firefighters attack it with water, foam and so on, and out it goes.

There’s more complexity, though, more depth to it than that. The material that’s burning has to be considered — is it natural or artificial, that sort of thing — training regimens accounted for and, well, the list runs long. Suffice to say, firefighting in 2024 is vastly different than it was in 1979, and getting to here from there wasn’t always a smooth ride.

“How has firefighting changed? Man, a lot!” Bolzer told the Register. “And one thing the fire service hates is not changing, and change — they hate both of them! Because you get used to doing something a set way, and then it changes, so you resist it. Even though for years you were complaining we should change this. That’s just the way the fire service is.”

Change is inevitable, and it has been nudged along, especially in the last few decades, by a pair of entities — the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Underwriters Laboratory. Together, with knowledge gained from their fire research laboratories, they’ve made the profession safer for everyone involved in it, much to Bolzer’s relief.

“It would have been very difficult for the fire service to adapt all of those changes if we didn’t have that research that is currently being done,” he said. “That research that they do kind of validates everything. Like I said, the fire service is always very resistant to change” — he laughs for a moment — “but that validates it and makes it a lot easier to change, because it shows that we could injure or kill firefighters. When it’s put in that perspective, we pay attention.”

Finding volunteers not easy

For the most part, change is a welcome thing — see above for proof of that. Nonetheless, it can also bring more unwelcome developments. In the case of Brookings, that would be a drop in volunteers seeking to join the city’s fire department.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find volunteers in Brookings. It’s kind of a hard pill to swallow because Brookings was always very unique — they always had a waiting list,” Bolzer said. “If you wanted to be a volunteer firefighter, sometimes you had to wait one or two years for a spot. And, right now, we’re short, and we have no applications.”

The department normally has 45 volunteers. Right now, it only has 41. That’s four short of optimal staffing levels — not bad, right? Well, not so fast. Bolzer said filling those open positions would give his crews a bit of a buffer.

“On weekends, especially in the summertime, we can be extremely short because I can’t control vacations or family functions or anything like that,” he said.

In the long run, though, it could get expensive for the city if there aren’t enough volunteers to staff its fire department.

“There’s going to come a time where we’re going to run out of volunteers and, I hate to say it, but then this department is going to have to move to a paid department,” Bolzer said. “Which I don’t want to see because that impacts the taxpayers and the service they’re going to get, and it impacts all the other city departments, also.

“Historically, a paid fire department is going to be one of your biggest city departments,” he continued. “So now the bulk of the budget is going to transfer, and I’m afraid it will affect the number of parks that the citizens in Brookings have, it’ll affect the number of police officers and it’ll affect how your streets are. I don’t want that.”

He said applications can be picked up at the East Fire Station at 607 20th Ave., just east of Burger King, or can be found online at the city’s website, https://cityofbrookings-sd.gov/.

‘It wasn’t all me’

Bolzer has played a huge role in getting the fire department to where it’s at today. You won’t ever hear him taking full credit for that, though.

“I had help building this department. It wasn’t all me,” he emphasized. “There were a lot of people involved in making this what it is today.”

He’s certainly humble, his experiences over the last 45 years in firefighting having likely played a significant role in who he is today. He’s earned the respect of others over those years, and, he said, that’s something his successor will also have to earn.

“The person coming in to replace me is going to have to earn the trust of the public — I think that’s one thing I’ve always enjoyed since I’ve been here: The public has always trusted me — and to me that is a big thing right there,” Bolzer noted. “Then you’re going to have to earn the trust of the volunteer firefighters, and that’s going to be the difficult task right there. … You may talk the talk, but you’re going to have to walk it, also. That’s what they’ll expect, and that’s why you’re going to have to do to earn their respect.”

He hopes to help whoever fills his shoes by also giving that person the opportunity to fill the now-vacant deputy fire chief position.

“The reason that position is vacant is I want to leave it up to the new fire chief,” Bolzer said. “Rather than me hire somebody that might clash with the new fire chief and create friction right up front, let’s let the new fire chief build a program the way they want to.”

He also wants to have time to work with his replacement to ensure a better transition.

“I really want my successor to be in place before I retire,” he said. “That way we can work together and have a really smooth transition, rather than I leave and” — he laughs — “‘Here. Here’s the keys. It’s up to you. Don’t burn the town down!’”

Turning serious again, he thinks for a moment, quiet.

“I’m not one just to leave. I want an orderly and long transition period so that the people who take these positions are successful,” Bolzer finally said. “In the long run, it’s going to make the department successful and it’s going to make the city of Brookings successful — and that’s my main goal.”

— Contact Mondell Keck at mkeck@brookingsregister.com.