Pocatello fire chief retires after more than two decades in the department
Published at | Updated at
POCATELLO – After a career that spanned over two decades in the fire department, Pocatello’s fire chief has retired.
Ryan O’Hearn, who became fire chief in 2022, retired from his position at the end of March. This marks the end of a 24-year career in the Pocatello Fire Department and the beginning of a new goal: preparing future fire service leaders.
“I really have enjoyed working with everybody in the department and throughout the city, and even relationships that we have outside the city with other agencies … (ensuring) that we’re meeting the needs of the community,” O’Hearn said.
The city of Pocatello held a retirement celebration for O’Hearn on Tuesday, honoring the former chief for his years of service.
O’Hearn became a firefighter with the department in 2002. Before that, he was working a sales job. Still, he “had always kind of been interested (in firefighting),” O’Hearn said.
Before he started at that sales job, he had worked at a hospital.
“(I had) gotten to know a lot of the paramedics that worked for the fire department … and so that always seemed interesting to me, and I was always interested in medicine and healthcare,” O’Hearn said.
O’Hearn decided to make joining the fire department a goal and went through the testing and training to become a firefighter. After he had completed that process, he joined the Pocatello Fire Department and began to work on an engine crew.
“Typically on an engine, you have a captain and an engineer and a firefighter, and I was the rookie firefighter, just learning the job of responding to emergencies,” O’Hearn said.
After about six years of gaining experience as a firefighter, O’Hearn was promoted to the role of paramedic in 2008, and then after another six years, he was promoted to the role of captain in 2014.
As a captain, O’Hearn began to gain more leadership experience while overseeing training and directing fire crews on the scene of emergencies.
“(Captain is) an increase in responsibility, and it’s more of a supervisory position, but still a line position and where you’re responding to fires and still using all of those same skills that you developed as a firefighter,” O’Hearn said.
Before his appointment to fire chief in 2022, O’Hearn gained even more leadership experience when he became the assistant chief of operations in 2020.
The way O’Hearn sees it, what put him up for the position was a combination of “12 years of experience as a firefighter and paramedic, responding to emergencies and learning the job, and developing as a leader.”
O’Hearn shared some of his proudest accomplishments in his time as the fire chief. One of them was reworking the department’s staffing and pay system, specifically related to how the department staffs paramedics.
“Now it’s less of a promoted position where somebody is on the ambulance all the time, and now we use them more throughout our system, which I think is a better use of the position,” O’Hearn said. “It allows for more flexibility in our employees. They move around more from the ambulance to one of the other apparatus … and I think it prevents burnout of our paramedics.”
O’Hearn also feels that the department “built a wildland (firefighting) program that I think is really good,” saying that Pocatello firefighters gain more experience in wildland firefighting, while also helping “our partners throughout the region and throughout the state, because we’re able, we’re able to assist on these larger incidents.”
The former fire chief also thinks that the department and the city have done a good job on “capital replacement,” keeping the department’s equipment up to date. Notably, the fire department acquired a tiller truck last year, allowing firefighters to maneuver more easily than with a traditional engine.
RELATED | Pocatello fire department’s brand new ‘tiller truck’ arrives
O’Hearn has been teaching classes in Idaho State University’s Fire Services Administration program since September and is now excited to focus his efforts on teaching.
But when he reflects on his career, his biggest takeaway is the relationships he has built with his fellow firefighters, both in the Pocatello Fire Department and in other agencies, as well as with the city at large.
“I think the biggest takeaway from the career is just the things that we have accomplished … in building those relationships to best serve the citizens,” O’Hearn said.