Firemen’s Association of the State of New York’s (FASNY) RecruitNY, which is in its eighth year, is an initiative that demonstrates firefighter’s efforts to help create calm in their community when calamity strikes.

The Gowanda Fire Department is taking part with a two-day event on Saturday and today. During Saturday’s activities, Gowanda firefighters attacked a situation where a truck was upside-down on a sedan’s hood; both vehicles were hood-to-hood. The department created hypotheticals to utilize their jaws of life equipment and remove the doors to save a possible victim, if the situation would arise.

Gowanda Fire Chief Nick Crassi was with his crew as they removed doors from the truck and then tampered with other ways that a victim could be saved if this, that or another problem occurred.

“We learned a lot of different things,” Crassi said. “One of them is: We have time to explore what doesn’t work and go on to something that we either from past experiences that we know that works or a different idea. … There is no perfect, ideal situation when somebody is trapped in a vehicle.

From left: assistant chief Steve Raiport, fire chief Nick Crassi, firefighter Scott Strohmeyer, (the helmet and face of) Nadean Chamberlain, Eric Russell and Rick Moore.

“The main thing is to protect the victim and get them out as safely as possible without doing anymore harm to the individual.”

For today’s activities which start around 10 a.m., the crew will do whitewater rescue repelling off the aerial truck. The whitewater rescue team is utilized with many issues including the car in Cattaraugus Creek incident earlier this month. Around lunchtime, Crassi said, the fire department will light the car and truck (that they took apart on Saturday) on fire and put the blaze out as a training.

The department’s end goal for the two-day event is to get eyes and members into the volunteer company.

“We really need firefighters to join and dedicated firefighters (at that),” Crassi said. “A lot of my members are dedicated for a lot of years and we do not get a lot of new guys.”

When some new members join, Crassi stated that they may leave for job relocations, family or going to the military. The need is obvious as houses can still go on fire, cars may still go in Cattaraugus Creek and accidents — quite often — happen.

Rick Moore, holding the jaws of life shears, speaks to Gowanda Fire Chief Nick Crassi as they are cutting the frame of the truck.

Though many of the heroes nowadays are wearing capes on the big screen, some are answering the call at 3 a.m. to extinguish the fire to save a family or a pet — or maybe even you.

“We hope that people see us that way,” Crassi said. “We are just doing things that we are trained to do. We don’t look at it as being heroes. It’s just a job and our job is to protect our people the best we can with the knowledge that we have.”