West Rutland
Fire Department
JOSEPH SKAZA, DEPARTMENT CHIEF
When I joined the fire department I just had an interest in serving my community.
And my father, he was in the fire department here, and he also served I believe for
42 years. I’ve been here now, it’s been 46 years, serving the department. I started in
February 1972. And I’m still here. It’s just doing something nice and helping out the
people in our community. It’s a good feeling to come back here and see somebody
that you’ve helped, or done something good for your community. I’ve always kind
of took an interest in firefighting, looking into the past on some of our older firemen
as I was growing up, at what they did for the community. That gave me a pretty
good interest in joining. One of our largest fires we had in town was the old mill fire
here. That was quite a fire here. It done over a million dollars of damage, and that
was one of our biggest fires that I had in the town of West Rutland. It went on for a
couple of days down there.
4 • RUTLAND HERALD HOMETOWN HEROES OCTOBER 2018