Fire Department Opens Its House

For the Dickenshaid family, attending Sunday's Dix Hills Fire Department Open House was much more than an outing filled with fun and learning. It was a simple, yet important gesture of thanks.

"They saved my daughter Deana's life," Tom Dickenshaid said. Added his wife, Diana, "It's the least we can do, to come out and celebrate them."

Just over a year ago, before Deana reached her second birthday, she became ill, started having complications and stopped breathing.

"They showed up in just over a minute," Tom Dickenshaid said. "If they hadn't done what they did, she would be dead."

It's a story played out countless times in firehouses across Long Island every day. Volunteer firemen--the men and women who awake from a sound sleep in the middle of the night on a bitter cold winter morning to rescue someone, put out a fire, or respond to an accident scene. Doing what they do for the communities in which they reside. So the annual open house event, held at their East Deer Park Road headquarters, was a celebration of what they do, and what the public can learn.

 "This is my 15th open house, and it was going on long before I got here," said Rob Fling, 3rd Assistant Chief of the Department. "Today is the first day of national fire prevention week, and we kick it off with our open house."           

 The open house gives the public an opportunity to look inside their local fire house, climb aboard fire trucks, and operate a fire hose. They also gave safety demonstrations, such as learning how to escape out a window, and performed the Stop, Drop and Roll technique used if you catch fire. Highlights of the day included a demonstration in which firefighters took a car apart using the "jaws of life" and the subsequent burning and extinguishing of the vehicle.

Typically, about one thousand people attend the event, Fling said. "I came down with my family so the kids can see how the fire house operates," said Rachel McCague.

Recently, the Suffolk County Medal of Valor award was given to two members of the Dix Hills Fire Department--Chief Richard Granahan and firefighter Brian Gleason--for a 2009 rescue they performed on a woman trapped in her burning car on Half Hollow Road.

"These firefighters are like superheroes," Diana Dickenshaid said. "It's good to have role models these days, and these guys are real. You can reach out and touch them."

For second-year EMT firefighter Larry Brown, volunteering is "a way to show compassion. It's an opportunity to give back to the community," he said.  Added Meryl Huckabey, a former New York City paramedic for more than 20 years, "They teach the community not only about what they do, but how [the public] can help themselves."

Huckabey, whose brother Robert Silverstein is a volunteer fireman in Dix Hills, attended the open house with her 8-year-old daughter, Layla. "She's here to see a little bit of what I used to do, and to make her aware," Huckabey said. "This generation will grow up knowing about fire safety."

 For Layla, the best part "was when they took the saw and cut out the window," she said. "It's cool."