When a fire breaks out on Nassau County’s North Shore, the sound of sirens doesn’t just mean one fire department is responding; it’s a call to a broader network of support.
In the villages and hamlets from Bayville to Glen Cove, fire departments collaborate through a system known as mutual aid, a coordinated response plan in which departments rely on one another for equipment, personnel and expertise.
“At the transmission of a working fire, if we feel that it’s necessary to call in mutual aid units, we’re getting three other departments to the scene of the fire,” Francesco Barbera, chief of the Atlantic Steamer Fire Company, in Oyster Bay, explained. “They’ll come to our headquarters and Company No. 1’s headquarters and stay here in case another alarm comes over while we’re dealing with the fire at hand.”
The coordination happens through Firecom, Nassau County’s centralized dispatch service, which maintains preplanned mutual aid responses that take into account the nature and severity of an emergency as well as its location.
“We’ll radio to them and we’ll tell them what we need,” Barbera said.
The mutual aid system is both highly organized and flexible. Any of the county’s 71 fire departments can request specialized resources such as dive teams, tankers or marine units, depending on the unique challenges of the call.
These plans have evolved over decades, and the county-wide coordination infrastructure predates even the Avianca plane disaster of 1990, in which 73 people were killed when a jetliner crashed in Cove Neck.
“It’s been something that’s been in the works to have an overarching set of goals,” Barbera said. “And it’s been established.”
Each fire department retains the authority to set its own local mutual aid plans — what departments respond, when, and with what equipment. Those plans are reviewed and updated periodically, especially when leadership changes or new equipment comes into service.
“It’s at the chiefs’ discretion,” Barbera said. “It can change as often as every year or every two years, or might not change for years on end. You apply logic to it, right? What works and what doesn’t work.”
Working together effectively in emergencies also depends on regular communication and training among departments. That happens through joint drills, formal training nights at the Bethpage Fire Academy, and quarterly meetings of the chiefs of the Fifth Battalion, which comprises nine departments in northeastern Nassau County.
“We also have quarterly meetings of the chiefs at battalion chiefs’ meetings,” Frank Ozol, Atlantic Steamer’s second assistant chief, said. “After we have our meeting, let’s all go downstairs, take a look.”
According to Barbera and Ozol, that kind of hands-on familiarity is key to knowing which neighboring departments can be relied on for certain types of calls. For example, Bayville and Atlantic Steamer are the only departments in the county that operate water tankers, which are crucial when fires occur in areas without hydrants or where water needs to be transported across long distances.
“I remember we had a fire in Locust Valley years ago,” Ozol recalled. “They had hydrants, but they had a driveway on a five-acre estate that was like a half a mile long. In situations like that, the tanker makes a huge difference.”
The inter-departmental cooperation isn’t limited to firefighting. When Glen Cove needed a dive team to search for a missing fisherman after a boat overturned over a decade ago, the department called Atlantic Steamer, having seen its dive gear at a battalion meeting.
While mutual aid has long been part of fire response in Nassau County, evolving technology and firefighting gear have reshaped the job.
“Back in the day when you were wearing roll-up boots and a trench coat and guys didn’t even have packs — now you’re fully encapsulated from head to toe, carrying an air pack, which is 40 pounds,” Barbera said. “You’re fatiguing the guys out a lot quicker than you used to.”
Ozol, who has been fighting fires since the late 1960s, noted that advances in fire science, better breathing equipment and more protective clothing have made fighting fires in buildings and homes safer and more effective, but also more physically demanding.
As fire departments across Long Island, and the country, continue to face recruitment challenges, the mutual aid system has only grown in importance. “I think it’s ultra critical,” Barbera said. “Because we’re all struggling. Everybody’s hurting for members.”
The strength of the mutual aid network lies not just in equipment or response times, but also in the relationships and trust departments build over years of working and training together. In a region where firefighters may live in one town and work in another, those ties are personal as well as professional.
“It’s a big family,” Barbera said. “We had a guy here the other day from Dublin. He was in the Dublin Fire Department, and his kids moved to Oyster Bay. He came by and we gave him a tour. Once you say you’re a firefighter, you’re welcomed in with open arms.”
