By Carl J. Haddon
Today is a Thursday morning in late January 2017, and the temperature is 87 degrees with 98 percent humidity. It’s hurricane season here and, at this moment, it’s raining so hard that the wipers on the commercial cab fire engine we’re in don’t stand a chance of keeping up. Our engineer/operator laughs as we pull over to wait out the squall under a large mango tree in the heart of one of the villages. I just realized that it probably doesn’t get any more “rural” than this in any other part of America. And no—I’m not in Hawaii or Florida.
I am on a teaching/consulting assignment on the island of Tutuila in the city of Pago Pago, American Samoa. Located in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, American Samoa is a United States territory.
Although a tropical Polynesian paradise that is steeped in rich culture and tradition, American Samoa’s fire service faces many of the same challenges that rural fire departments face on the mainland of the United States—with a bit of a twist.
Resembling 1940s Hawaii, the island of Tutuila is home to roughly 65,000 people scattered over 24 square miles of tropical real estate. The majority of the population lives and works in the vicinity of Pago Pago. In addition to Tutuila, there are also sparsely populated outer islands that comprise part of American Samoa.
The fire department here is under the auspices of the Department of Public Safety, which also is responsible for the local police department (the cops here do not carry firearms). There are five fire stations here, but only two of those stations have apparatus in them. One of the staffed fire stations is at the international airport, where it houses one P-19 and two Striker ARFF fire trucks. The other staffed station is the main fire station in Pago Pago, which houses two engines and a tanker-pumper.
There is plenty of potential work for the fire department here, as American Samoa is home to one of the deepest water seaport harbors in the world, complete with a fuel tank farm. Additionally, Starkist Tuna has the world’s largest tuna canning operation here. For those old enough to remember, Pago Pago is the original home of “Charlie Tuna.” The international airport (two runways) also has two smaller lagoons on property in between runways and it is bordered by a very large lagoon on either side of the runways for which the airport fire department provides for all water rescue/recovery operations that occur there (see photos). n 2009, American Samoa saw a major Tsunami (tidal wave) that killed 30 and wiped out a big portion of the inhabited areas of the island. It is also susceptible to earthquakes.
Like many areas of the rural fire service on the mainland and around the world, there are no minimum fire training standards here, and the average age of these fire crews continues to rise, with seemingly little interest in our honored profession from the younger generations. As a result, firefighter recruitment and retention is also a huge issue that we have in common. Also, like many areas of the domestic rural fire service, this area struggles