'I'd do it all over again': Kittery Fire Chief David O'Brien retiring after 49 years

KITTERY, Maine — Like father, like son.

David O’Brien, longtime chief of the Kittery Fire Department, remembers the moments from his childhood when his father, a volunteer call firefighter in town, would be summoned out of bed and ordered to an active fire scene. O’Brien’s mother would wake up, hand his father the keys, and off he’d go to fight the fire.

O’Brien would wake up in their Badger’s Island home and, if the fire was roaring close by in Portsmouth, walk over to the Memorial Bridge to watch his father and the first responders work to hose down the scene.

“I used to be 10 years old, and I’d walk across the bridge, no matter what time, 2 or 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, and go to the fire because I knew Kittery (firefighters) would be there,” he recalled. “My father would look for me to see that I was there, just to kind of take care of me. It was a different world. We would do that stuff.”

Just as his father did, O’Brien became a call firefighter in Kittery in 1975 after spending his childhood with his father in the old Walker Street fire station, then similarly became the town’s deputy fire chief before stepping away. But in 1998, two years after leaving the department, then-Town Manager Philip McCarthy came calling with a pitch for O’Brien to return as fire chief.

That year, he assumed control of the Kittery Fire Department from former Chief George Varney, though O’Brien, then also a Portsmouth Naval Shipyard engineer, intended to serve as the department’s head for just three years. But three years turned to four, and as his children got older, his schedule opened up. O’Brien continued in his job, staying put for much longer than anticipated.

Today, 49 years after joining the town fire department, O’Brien is calling it a career at the end of April, leaving the local force and moving to Raymond, Maine, just shy of 26 years of service as chief. His final day before turning his responsibilities over to soon-to-be chief Craig Alfis, the town’s assistant fire chief, will be April 30.

What will O’Brien miss most about his work? His answer is simple.

“Firefighting,” he responded in a Tuesday interview. “And I dare you to find a firefighter that won’t say that. It’s that adrenaline rush when a call comes in and you listen to it. There’s no such thing as a routine call, but when it’s a little bit more than just an alarm activation, there’s an adrenaline rush. It’s neat.”

O’Brien joined the Kittery Fire Department years before it transitioned to a full-time force under his watch.

Upon joining the department, O’Brien estimates there were 35 call firefighters for the Gorges Road station and another 35 in Kittery Point, figures that have heavily dwindled over the years.

The Town Council honored O’Brien’s leadership with a proclamation Monday night. The body praised him for a record that includes furthering the town’s relationship with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, boosting the town’s rating from the Insurance Services Office, replacing old equipment and fire apparatuses, expanding the town’s fire stations and transitioning the department to a full-time service.

O’Brien commended Town Manager Kendra Amaral Monday for her work to bring more full-time firefighters into the fray after he spent years advocating for a more hands-on deck.

“She is the one that made it possible to take it to the next level, which was with the career firefighters,” he said at the council meeting. “She was the one that listened after all my years of sitting there saying, ‘It’s not a call department anymore. The run numbers are up, the population is up. We just can’t do it anymore with a call force of 78-year-olds and 72-year-olds.’ And she recognized that through numbers of years or providing information through the budget, which allowed us to progress that forward.”

The largest fire that O’Brien ever served as the on-scene commander for was the fatal five-alarm blaze at the now-destroyed Days Inn on the Route 1 Bypass last May, an incident worsened by dry and windy conditions. The fire took hours to extinguish, requiring over a dozen tankers bringing water to the fire as surrounding traffic on the busy roadway was diverted for a long period. Smoke was seen for miles and debris from the burning building flew into adjacent lots, causing minor damage to nearby structures.

One person — 57-year-old Daniel Clarke of Manassas, Virginia — was killed in the fire.

“The Days Inn was the most ferocious (fire) in a short period of time that I’ve ever been on. It was a nasty day,” O’Brien remembered.

Beyond his job in Kittery, O’Brien has served in numerous other fire-related capacities, including the Maine Association of Fire Chiefs and on the Executive Board of the Seacoast Fire Officers Mutual Aid District, per the town.

“He’s going to leave a big hole,” Town Council chairperson Judy Spiller said Monday. “I think we know what a great job he does training.”

“We’ve got a great new chief coming in,” added council vice chairperson Colin McGuire.

Alfis is slated to take over the top spot from O’Brien at the start of May. The Kittery resident joined the town department as a call firefighter in 2008, when the department was still fully composed of an all-call team. He then became the assistant fire chief in 2019.

Alfis, 38, dually serves as the town’s code enforcement officer, a responsibility he'll transition out of as he becomes fire chief.

“I’ve worked for chief for 15 years,” he said of O’Brien. “He is sometimes a tough person to work for but he’s doing that to mold you into the type of employee that he needs to (have). All of these firefighters here have thrived under him, myself included. He really, from almost day one, saw some potential in me that I didn’t see and has just worked to be a mentor to teach me the trade.”

Firefighting is also in Alfis’ blood, as the incoming chief’s father was a career firefighter in Hanover, Massachusetts. Alfis came north after his college graduation to originally work as an engineer at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard but found his love for the service in Maine’s oldest town.

The Kittery Fire Department, which has its primary station on Gorges Road and another in Kittery Point, is looking to add more full-time firefighters to its team. The department presently is only fully staffed 10 hours every day, rather than on a 24/7 basis, according to Alfis.

“It will be fun really for me to step into that unknown and start to shape how that’s going to work,” he said.

“I hand-picked Craig to be chief,” O’Brien said. “We’ve been training him for years to do it.”

An additional order of business will be for the department to hire a full-time assistant fire chief to serve under Alfis.

As soon as he signs off from his post in Kittery, O’Brien is turning off all notifications on his phone that would alert him to any fire occurring in Kittery. If he knows, he’ll want to jump straight into action as he has for decades.

“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be up in Raymond and hear they have a structure fire down in Kittery because it’ll just drive me crazy,” he joked.

The outgoing chief plans to remain active working in the fire service in some capacity, with an eye toward eventually seeking opportunities in fire education.

Locally, O’Brien is not the only municipal fire chief to go the distance. Next door in Eliot, Fire Chief Jay Muzeroll is in his 50th year of service, while in Exeter, New Hampshire, Fire Chief Eric Wilking is retiring after 42 years across multiple communities.

“I think the two of them, plus myself, will tell you there are times where you’ve just got to roll with the punches,” O’Brien said of his two friends and colleagues. “It may drive you crazy, but you’ve just got to. I’m not one to usually let something pass. I usually speak my piece. But sometimes you’ve just got to say, ‘Okay, that’s the way it is.’”

“I’d do it all over again,” he added.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Kittery Maine Fire Chief David O'Brien retiring after 49 years