Coffee With: Scott Goeben
by Carl Wiser
Staff Writer
Scott Goeben remembers when firefighters were called to action the old-fashioned way. "They had a Plectron, which was a red box, and the tone would go out," he says over coffee at LaSalle. "They had fire sirens on poles. The fire siren would go off, and you went to the firehouse."
He was living on Hickory Hill in Simsbury, and his older brother Ken was in the fire department, answering these calls. "That's where I caught the bug," he says. "There was a fire across from our house one night, so I got to see everything they did, and I was hooked." (Ken, now in his 70s, is still a firefighter in Pennsylvania.)
Goeben joined the Simsbury Volunteer Fire Department in 1979 and was there until 1985, when he moved to Canton and joined the Collinsville VFD, reaching the rank of second lieutenant. There were no stipends back then, so Goeben worked a number of jobs, mostly in sales, before landing at (blast from the past!) Bradlees Department Store, which was next to the Stop & Shop in Simsbury.
"I was the Damage Control Coordinator for Bradlees," he says. "I was the last guy to leave Bradlees when they closed up. We put all the fixtures on pallets, loaded them on trucks, and I was literally the last guy out the door."
This was 1992, soon after Goeben's first son was born. The state helped Bradlees employees find jobs, but there were none out there for damage control coordinators, so they offered him retraining. Goeben used that opportunity to study fire science. "I watched my son during the day and went to college at Capital Community College at night," he says. "One of the instructors was a fire marshal at Yale. He said, 'We have room for some interns. Are you interested in being an intern?' I took the offer. I was driving from Canton down to New Haven as a very poorly paid intern."
That was the start of 32 years in the Yale fire service, where he became a fire inspector ("the big kahuna") in 2011. Goeben held that position until his retirement, and until 2022 he remained active with the Canton Volunteer Fire Department as well, where he ended up in charge of training.
At Yale, he worked 12-hour shifts, three days on, three days off, including holidays and weekends. Those three days off are when he would serve in Canton and spend time with family.
"I was fortunate to work with amazing people who always wanted you to do better, learn more, expand your horizons," says Goeben. "There was a lot of encouragement. The marshals I've had here in town were amazing. Every fire marshal in the state has to have 90 hours of continuing education every three years. Most have many more hours than that. The laws change almost every year. The codes change every five years. New things come along, like lithium battery fires – how do you handle those? How do you investigate those?"
Those lithium batteries are found in cars, scooters and phones. "Take your phone, plug it into the wrong charger, lay it on your bed, make your bed with the blankets over the top of it, and see what happens," says Goeben. "It usually doesn't end well. It'll overheat, and in some cases it gets hot enough to start a fire."
Life as a Fire Inspector
"The average day would be a list of buildings owned by Yale to inspect for fire code compliance: checking extinguishers, sprinkler systems, things like that. There's all kinds of contractor work constantly going on. You oversee shutting off sprinkler systems, turning off smoke detectors if they're making dust. We oversee construction projects, making sure that if they're doing hot work – cutting, welding, grinding – they don't burn the building down. There are permits issued every day.
"There are 13 inspectors in the office. They're all certified firefighters and federally certified hazmat technicians. In addition to calls for smells of burning or gas or a possible chemical emergency in a lab, we also respond to all emergencies.
"Yale owns a lot – millions of square feet of space. Stuff people probably don't even realize Yale owns. In Farmington, on the corner of Route 10 and Meadow Road is the Lewis Walpole Library and Museum. It looks like part of Miss Porter's, but Yale owns and operates it."
And yes, Goeben often had to be the bad guy, a nemesis to contractors and building owners. "When I took the state fire marshal class, the first day, the state's attorney said, 'If you don't make at least one person upset a day, you're probably not doing your job,' because they're either going to do something they don't want to do, not do something they want to do, spend money, or all three."
"Canton is very fortunate," he adds. "We try really hard to work with people when they want to come up with a new idea and do something different. There are a lot of different ways to get there in compliance with the code and still keep people safe. Building and fire work as a team to do that. That's one of the things I loved about Canton: the variety of stuff to inspect. With the exception of rail and an airport, you have everything else a big city has here. You've got high-rises and even fuel oil storage - if you go down Ramp Road or Powder Mill Road to the end, there's a big storage facility, Saxon Shippers. And on Route 44, on Colonial Road, there's a big storage facility there.
"Canton has three different tunnels in town that are used for utilities. People don't even know they're there and they walk over them. The Collins Company complex is an immense amount of stuff to keep track of. Then all the three-family houses in town that have to be inspected, the restaurants, the shops – there's a lot going on that most people don't think about."
Runs and Training
Goeben says he went on over 15,000 runs in his career. "A run is a call for service," he explains. "At Yale, it could be a fire alarm that's dirty and having an issue. It could be a leak or a spill in a lab. It could be a water leak causing flooding and shorting out electrical. It can always be a fire, but a lot are what we call 'smells and bells.' Somebody comes in and smells an electrical smell in their office first thing in the morning. That needs to be checked out, but you don't necessarily need the whole fire department with three engines and two ladder trucks. We'll go and meet electricians or HVAC guys on scene if there's a belt slipping, something like that. The runs are documented calls for service.
"A lot of the ones that stick in your brain are not pleasant. Nasty car accidents. In the late '70s and early '80s, there were a lot of problems with hang gliders going off Talcott Mountain. They'd get caught in the backdraft and come back into the mountain. You'd have to rappel over the edge and pull them back up. Here in Canton, there are cliffs and steep inclines. We have to prepare for that and for the river. We protect the river basically from Pleasant Valley all the way down to Farmington. A lot of runs for fire alarms, car accidents, a ton of medical calls. In Canton they had a call a couple of weeks ago to get ducklings out of a storm drain. You have to prepare for all of it. We've had guys train in the tunnels. Pretend the tunnel's full of smoke, scenarios like that.
"They do mass casualty incident drills. They'll come up with a scenario where you have a bus flip over full of kids. They'll put makeup on kids to make them look bruised and bleeding, and you stage them. You have to bring in resources, figure out triage – who's worst, who's not. Red tags to green, who goes in an ambulance, who can go in somebody's car. There's an immense amount of training that goes on behind the scenes.
"One of the coolest MCI [Mass Casualty Incident] drills I did was in Hartford. They took a crane and a small plane and set it in Dillon Stadium. The scenario was that the plane crashed in Dillon Stadium during a soccer game. They had to transport all these people to hospitals. They realized they had left out the hospital in Southington and hadn't sent any patients there. They were getting ready to go home, and they took nine people and put us in a station wagon with all rear-facing seats. They covered everybody in blood and guts and drove into the emergency entrance and honked the horn. The workers came out and looked at this car full of bloody people. They thought the drill was over and thought it was real. But all of that is training: what to do, who, when, where, why."
"The interesting thing to me is how much the fire service has changed since I started. When I started in Simsbury, we were still riding the rear step - you didn't have enclosed cabs like you have now. Maybe you got three people in the front, but you had a shifter in the middle, so you had to be careful shifting or you could get tangled up.
"Simsbury had a lot of buildings, especially in the north end of town, that were being torn down. We actually fought fires for drills in real buildings and scenarios. That was the best training ever because you were training under real fire conditions. But you didn't have all the plastics and stuff you've got now that will kill you. It was wood, hay, maybe asphalt shingles on a roof. You had cotton bedding, natural materials, not the amount of plastics you have now.
"In Canton, we had great drills. We'd go up to Mills Pond in the summer. We would have the lifeguards go over water safety – if someone jumped off the diving board and hurt their back, there's a special way to get them out safely and stabilize them. We'd basically take over Mills for an evening, put hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill, and families could come up and use the other end of the pool. It was a lot of family time."
In retirement, Goeben has done more volunteer work, taking patients to doctor appointments and staying active with the Canton Volunteer Fire Company and the Collinsville Volunteer Fire Department. He also has a "really nice drone."
"I want to get my official drone license," he says. "I like photography and want to spend more time doing that. We're going to Europe – our first trip – in the fall. There's plenty to do."
Sitting outside at LaSalle, we got to know Goeben better with these "Coffee With" questions.
What's a good day for you since retirement?
Getting up, having breakfast with my wife Colleen before she goes to work, taking the dog for a walk, going down to the river to see if she wants to go for a swim, watering the garden.
What are some of your favorite places in the area?
Walking at Nepaug Reservoir early in the morning. Going for a walk in Stratton Brook State Park. I have tons of memories there as a kid from family picnics. When my grandson's down, we take him over and let him play with his trucks on the beach.
Sometimes I walk my son's dog, sometimes my own. The dogs pick up different stuff than we do. If you look at what the dogs are looking at – get down and look between their ears – you can see and discover a lot you didn't realize was going on. My record at Stratton Brook with a previous dog was four bears in different places on one walk. It didn't bother him.
What's one of your hidden talents?
Making maple syrup. We tap anywhere between the middle of January and early February, depending on the weather. The late, great Dave Leff, who lived down here on the green – the town poet laureate – was also on the fire department and one of my best friends. He did maple sugaring for many years out of his garage. We'd go and help. I got involved because my brother down in Branford had a couple large trees they'd tap, and they were boiling in their backyard. But everything down there is basically postage stamp-sized lots, and somebody complained about the wood smoke and steam from making maple syrup. He said, "Can we bring this stuff up here and set it up in your driveway?" That's how that started, and it evolved from there. The most we've made in a year is about 10 gallons of finished product. I give it to friends.
What are you most proud of from your work in the fire service?
In town here, I'm most proud of the cadet program and the way we took care of the town over the years. At Yale, I'm most proud of our accomplishments. We were one of the first universities in the country to make sure there was a monitored, real fire alarm system in every building where somebody slept, even a one-family house.
Top photo by Carl Wiser. All others courtesy of Scott Geoben.