On Jan. 19, Carole Summerall will officially retire from Columbus Fire & Rescue. When she does, she will become the first woman to ever retire from CF&R.
Summerall, who has lived in Columbus nearly all her life, has worked for the department since 1991. For a year before her hiring, she worked as a volunteer firefighter.
“I started doing fire training with them, and somebody mentioned, ‘Well, why don’t you apply (with) the city (fire department)? They have openings,'” Summerall said. “So I applied for the city and passed my physical agility test and then passed the written test and I was hired.”
Summerall wasn’t the first woman to be hired by CF&R, according to Anthony Colom, the department’s spokesperson. But she is only one of three women to ever work for the department and the only one who stayed long enough to retire, Colom said.
As Summerall herself pointed out, firefighting is a physically demanding job.
“I was lucky because my first captain was a family friend, more or less a neighbor,” she said. “And I grew up and went to school with a lot of the firefighters that were already hired. So I knew several people already. So it wasn’t too bad, but it’s just a really physically demanding job.”
Knowing and trusting her coworkers, many of whom worked as city and volunteer firefighters, was important, because firefighters have to put so much trust in each other on the job. The trust and camaraderie they develop is one of Summerall’s favorite things about the job.
“It’s like having a whole other family, complete with the crazy uncles, people that you normally would have in your family,” she said. “You have arguments, but I can trust if I ask anybody to do anything, or if I need help, I have no doubt that they would help me.”
This trust helped Summerall stay cool in some of the first fires she ever fought.
“They start training you from day one and you’ve got to trust your coworkers and they have to trust you as well,” she said. “So I trusted that they weren’t going to put me in a bad situation and they trusted that I was going to do what I was told. So there’s a large trust factor.”
After about five years as a rookie firefighter, Summerall was promoted to engineer. As engineer, she drove and pumped the firetruck. In 2001, she became the department’s first ever Fire and Life Safety Educator. At the time, few other fire departments in Mississippi had a public education division.
Summerall said it was forward-thinking on the part of CF&R to start focusing on prevention rather than only battling emergencies when they happened.
The public education division doesn’t just focus on fire prevention either, Summerall said. The division educates the public on everything from bicycle and pedestrian safety to child passenger safety.
“Now we have 33 child passenger safety technicians within the department,” Summerall said. “We didn’t have any before. We’ve got CPR First Aid instructors in the department. We do bicycle safety, pedestrian safety, all sorts of stuff like that…the fire prevention, that’s a big part of it, but that’s not all that we do here.”
Summerall also volunteers with the Red Cross and serves on the Mississippi Burn Camp board. She will continue her work with these organizations after she retires. She even has a retreat with Burn Camp in January.
Still, one of the things Summerall said she will look forward to after retiring is slowing down — living according to her own schedule and taking care of her mother.
Shortly after she retires, her son, Eric, will apply for a position with CF&R. The department has a nepotism policy that means Summerall and her son can’t both work for the city at the same time. Summerall knew she would be approaching retirement around the same time her son would be approaching the age he could apply. He won’t get any special consideration, Summerall said, and will have to go through the same process she went through to become a firefighter.
But she’s hoping he will carry on the tradition.
“It’s been a fantastic job,” Summerall said.
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