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06/15/2022 08:30 AMEast Haven native Eileen Parlato has spent the past 28 years serving the town of East Haven through the East Haven Fire Department. On June 17 she will retire from her position as a paid battalion chief but plans to stick close to home and still be of service to the town and its residents.
Although Eileen spent nearly 30 years of her life helping people through emergency medicine and firefighting, her first professional wish was to become a medical doctor.
“But the means were not really there,” Eileen recalls of her youthful aspirations.
When she learned that she could still function in the medical field as an EMT, she jumped at the chance and took an EMT class.
“My brother, Freddy, was already a volunteer firefighter within in the town and they did medical calls,” recalls Eileen. “So, once I got my EMT license, I joined the volunteer fire department.”
In 1993, Eileen moved over to the town’s paid fire department and two years after that she attended paramedic school to enhance her knowledge and interest in life-saving services. The town itself did not have a full paramedic department until around 2005, according to Eileen.
“When I first got hired, firefighter and battalion chief were the only ranks other than fire marshal and training officer,” Eileen recalls of how the East Haven Fire Department was structured at the time.
“We have since added captains,” she explains of the department’s growth over the years, “but that was long after I became a battalion chief.”
While East Haven has both a volunteer fire department and a paid department, four shifts comprise the paid department and each shift has its own battalion chief, of which Eileen is one.
“The battalion chiefs run the daily fire department operations for the town, under the fire chief and the assistant chief,” explains Eileen.
Each shift, at present, is 24 hours on and 72 hours off, according to Eileen, “so it’s a 24-hour shift, then three days off, then back for another 24-hour shift,” she says. “When I first started, we worked three 10-hour days with three days off, and then three 14-hour nights with three days off. About five years ago we moved to the 24-hour shifts.”
“I don’t know of anybody who can come into this job and not have that feeling of wanting to help others,” Eileen says of the proverbial cloth from which all EMTs, paramedics, and firefighters are cut. “That’s pretty much all we do, help people in need.”
Firefighting might take stamina and discipline akin to the nature of the work, but Eileen says, “I believe the same thing goes, for example, for people who work with special needs children. Everybody is here to do a certain thing that they are good at, and this just happened to be what I found myself good at.”
Eileen says she recalls many good moments in her nearly three decades of helping people, among them, the joy of assisting in the delivery of babies into the world. And Eileen has particularly fond memories of going into schools to talk with children about fire safety.
“I still remember when we had a strong [school] program, back in the day,” Eileen recalls. “I was stationed at one of the out-lying fire houses and we had a little girl come to the firehouse. She had written down, in crayon on the piece of paper, the names of three boys that were playing with matches. She wanted to let us know about it,” Eileen recalls with a heartfelt laugh.
“That was the part I liked the most,” Eileen continues, “interacting with the community. Not necessarily all the time on calls but doing public safety education. We would go into the schools and sometimes read to the students during the read-to events once a year and interact with the community at different events. Those are the things I enjoyed the most about my job.”
On the flip side, Eileen recalls those larger incidents that haunt the mind; those tragic emergency calls that are never quite forgotten.
For Eileen, two incidents she will never forget involved plane crashes in town. In one crash, a father and son lost control of their plane upon departing from Tweed New Haven Airport and crashed into an East Haven house, killing two girls inside the house. The pilot and his son also died.
“And there was another time when a student pilot and teacher crashed their plane,” Eileen recalls. “I was there for that. The student survived. A year and a half later the student found me on Facebook. He reached out to me and wanted to thank me.”
In her personal life, Eileen says that after she was hired into her life’s career in the fire department, “I went back to college, and then I ended up having two children, so college got put on hold. I’ve got about a year left to get my bachelor’s degree in fire science arson investigation at the University of New Haven, so that’s what I’m going to do after retirement. It’s on my bucket list and I feel if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.”
At age 53, Eileen feels young and likes to think she has another career ahead of her.
“I have a second life I can live. Who knows where my path is going to take me? The medical field has always interested me. My daughter has aspirations to apply to [physician assistant] school, which I’m super jealous about because I always wanted to be a doctor,” she says.
When it comes to volunteer work, Eileen was a vaccinator during the height of COVID, lends a hand at the East Haven Food Pantry, helps with Clean Up East Haven, assists with the delivery of the Rotary’s annual Thanksgiving dinners, and is an active member of Team Rubicon, an international disaster response team.
And in keeping with Eileen’s belief in volunteerism—and not losing her years of experience as a paramedic—she will keep her paramedic license current and says, “I’m going to be volunteering with the East Haven Volunteer Fire Department doing medical calls,” once she’s no longer on the department’s payroll.
“My parents always taught me to give back,” Eileen says. “To volunteer and give your time when you can. Both my parents were awarded the Mayor’s Merit Award for their volunteerism in town, so they were my example.”
While leaving her career fire department may be bittersweet, Eileen says, “I loved working with all the firefighters over the years. It was a great ride, and I would not have changed any moment of it.”
“I’ll be leaving the career side of firefighting and EMS services,” Eileen concludes, “but I’ll still be doing what I love on the volunteer side. At Team Rubicon we go by a saying, ‘If not me, then who?’” And that’s the way we try to look at things. If I don’t do it, then who is going to do it?”