WESTFIELD – The city’s four newest firefighters were sworn into service by the City Clerk Karen Fanion Friday at a special meeting of the Westfield Fire Commission and will start working on the city department at the end of the month.
Their appointment was the culmination of an effort to fill three positions for firefighters with paramedic credentials and a single slot for a basic emergency medical technician qualified firefighter.
The candidates had appeared before the commission previously and had undergone an extensive background check prior to their final interviews at the Feb. 3 meeting of the commission.
The three new paramedic qualified firefighters are Christopher Brown, Jonathan Imbriglio and Paul Poznyur while Brian McEwan was hired as the newest firefighter with basic EMT qualifications.
All the new firefighters are city residents but Brown grew up in Southwick.
He told the commissioners that part of the reason he bought a house in the city was that “I set my goal a long time ago to work for the Westfield Fire Department.”
He explained that he got his first taste of fire services work as a volunteer with the Southwick Fire Department and went to the part-time fire academy while he worked for that department.
“I really started to love firefighting” he said and was impressed with the Westfield firefighters when he encountered them while working on the Southwick ambulance which is sometimes intercepted by city firefighters when a patient needs the advanced life support capabilities the professional department can provide.
“The professionalism and ethics that they showed me when they intercepted me really made me strive to be like that in my career,” he said.
Brown said that he want to work on the city department because “I feel an obligation to just serve the public in our community.”
Poznyur is not a city native either and told the commission that his family moved to the city “searching for a better life” when he was nine.
He said that his ancestry is Slavic and that he speaks both Ukrainian and Russian which could be useful in the city which has a significant Slavic population.
“I’m pretty sure Westfield Fire encounters a lot of patients that are in need of care (who are) not speaking English well,” he said and that he can both care for their injuries and translate for them.
Poznyur said that he has been working for National Ambulance were he started as a basic EMT and subsequently became paramedic qualified.
He said that he also rose to a position of leadership at the company serving both as a field training officer and field control officer there.
Commission chairman Albert Masciadrelli noted that, according to Poznyur’s reference from the company, “they speak very highly of you.”
“I definitely want to grow and contribute as much as I can to the Westfield Fire Department,” Poznyur said.
Imbriglio is not a city native but has lived in the city for about ten years, he said.
He said that he works as a paramedic and said that working for the Westfield Fire department “would mean a lot to me.”
He said he is “willing to do whatever it takes to succeed” and went on to say “I try to be the best at whatever I try to do.”
The basic EMT firefighter position went to Brian McEwan, a lifelong city resident, who said that he left the city to study fire services at Louis Garland Fire Academy in Texas.
He said that the program was grueling and pointed out that he was one of the nine persons in the 25-member class who completed the course.
He has been working of the fire department at the 104th Fighter Wing based at Barnes Airport where he said he has worked with city ambulance crews.
“It’s been my ultimate goal to become a city firefighter,” he said.
Between his formal training and his experience with the fire department at the air base, he said, “I’ve learned a lot of skills that I could bring to the job.”
