Firefighting Father of Five Reflects on 28 Years with LMFD

When he was a young firefighter, John Burningham loved the excitement and action of the job.

It was a career he’d aspired to since he was a kid watching Emergency! on TV or daydreaming about working at La Mesa Fire Station 13 as he rode past it on his bike. And when a family friend with the El Cajon Fire Department allowed him to ride on a fire truck one day, he was completely hooked.

It was something he wanted so much that he stood in line for a week just to get an application for the San Diego City Fire Academy.

But after 28 years on the job, Burningham—an engineer for the La Mesa Fire Department at Station 11 on Allison Avenue—has a much more refined sense of what being a firefighter is all about.

Yes, the excitement is still there. In a job that features everything “from the mild to wild,” his day can evolve in an instant from calm to chaos.

But now as a 50-year-old father of five, a husband and a man with deep roots in La Mesa and El Cajon, the job means so much more than it did when he was a 22-year-old rookie.

Now it’s an opportunity to give back to the community and connect with people.

“The biggest satisfaction is taking somebody from a negative situation and helping them out,” he says. “I think the only problem now is the older I get the more emotional or sentimental I get toward people.”

Now he says he can better relate to people and the many different emotions they’re going through, mostly because he’s going through them himself.

“[W]hether it’s dealing with aged parents or teenage kids, or that kind of stuff,”  Burningham says. “It’s real to me.”

Career Evolution

To many who work with him, Burningham is a pro’s pro and a stickler for details.

Captain Todd Nelson admits he’s biased—he’s a good friend of Burningham’s—but he calls him “a damn good” firefighter.

 “I remember my first day coming back from a call, and he was asking me questions as soon as I got on the rig till I got off the rig,” says Nelson, who joined the department 15 years ago. “What do you know about this? How much you know about this? That’s kind of typical.”

Nelson says Burningham gives guys a pretty hard time because he wants to make sure they’re good at their job.

“He doesn’t want guys working for us who aren’t good at their job. He tries to pass along his knowledge and set a good example.”

Burningham worked as a firefighter and in fire prevention before being promoted 12 years ago to engineer, which means he drives a fire truck, including the long ladder truck. That can be a challenge on La Mesa’s sometimes narrow, winding and hilly streets.

“It’s a series of cow trails or goat trails,” he says with a laugh.

At the Allison Avenue station—La Mesa’s busiest—there are seven department members on duty at all times, with three trucks.

When the ladder truck is called out, a captain, two firefighters and an engineer will go. As engineer, Burningham’s responsibilities include driving the truck (and knowing how to get where they’re going), setting up on scene and taking care of logistics and equipment and tending to the needs of the firefighters.

“A lot of it is anticipation of what your crew is going to need for equipment, for hydration, for breathing air,” he says. “You make the job run smoother. You work with the crew long enough, you’ll learn what you need at certain stages.”

Burningham also operates the aerial—the 100-foot extension ladder. It requires steadiness and depth perception to put “three guys in a basket right onto a roof so they can step off safely.” He likens it a bit to operating a video game, with controls and joystick—except it’s no game.

“A really jerky motion one way or another could throw firefighters out of the basket and be really hard on equipment,” he says.

When they get a call, Burningham often hears a familiar voice. His wife, Amy, is a dispatch supervisor for Heartland Fire and Rescue, the joint body that oversees the La Mesa, El Cajon and Lemon Grove fire departments.

“So she gets to tell me what to do at work as well as at home,” he jokes.

Aptly Named

He knows a firefighter named Burningham is a bit like a librarian named Bookman or a mechanic named Fixx.

“I guess my name is kind of ironic,” he says. “People that I meet for the first time usually say, ‘That's funny, your name is Burningham and you're a fireman.’ I usually just chuckle and agree.”

He says the name has British roots, and his mother told him years ago it was given to a family that was running from a “burning home.” He’s not certain if that’s true, but does find it ironic that he’s usually running into burning homes, not out of them.

While running into burning buildings may be part of the job description, it’s not an everyday experience. Many calls involve the mundane: people “smell something funny,” or a family member has forgotten to take his medicine and isn’t feeling well.

Yet Burningham says he keeps in mind that every call is important.

“These people are having a crisis,” he says. “Whether we believe it’s a crisis or not is irrelevant because it’s a crisis to them. And anything other than a good attitude when you come into that is going to be a disservice to people that are paying us to be here.”

Other calls, however, truly are crises and result in tragedy.

He remembers several years ago being called to a house fire in Spring Valley. A boy had used gasoline to feed a fire in the fireplace during a party, and three children, ages 4 to 12, were missing after flames consumed the structure. When he and other firefighters arrived, it was Burningham’s assignment to help search for the children. All three were found dead.

That call, he says, was devastating.

“This whole thing took place over 20 or 30 minutes, doing this search,” he says. “It gave you a lot of time to actually realize the tragedy that occurred. And being a father with kids of similar age—I mean my kids range from 12 to 25, five of them—it was a really, really hard call for me.”

He says he returned to the fire station at around 2 a.m. and called his daughter to tell her how much he loved her. For him, the call home is like hitting a re-set button, even though he doesn't tell his family why he's calling exactly.

“She said, ‘Dad, why are you calling me?’ I said, ‘I just want to make sure you’re OK and tell you I love you,’ ” he recalls. “That call stands out as one of the hardest ones for me. That one was personal.”

Family Time

As he looks back on his career, Burningham believes one of the best parts of the job has been the time it has given him with his family.

While the hours and stresses can be difficult—a normal workweek may include four 24-hour shifts—the job also provides four- or six-day chunks of time off that allow Burningham to spend at his Jamul home. As rewarding as the job has been, that has been even more important, he says.

He was explaining that recently to his oldest son, now in college. His advice: Pick a path that will allow family time.

“I told him I wouldn’t trade my family experiences of watching my kids grow up for anything in the world,” he says. “At 50 years old, that is the most important thing to me. It’s not money. It’s not a house. It’s my experiences with my children.”

Also, Burningham says, a firehouse can become like a second home and its members a second family. His closest friends, he says, are the people he trusts with his life, the ones he’s worked with for years.

This September, he’ll be taking the motorcycle trip of a lifetime with four of his longtime partners and biking buddies. They’ll leave Sept. 1 on a 22-day, 10,000-mile cross-country loop through the Rockies, up into Canada, down to Boston, the Carolinas, New Orleans and back to San Diego. But at the heart of the trip is being at Ground Zero in New York City for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Burningham can remember watching events unfold on television from his La Mesa firehouse that day, and hearing that so many firefighters – who had rushed into the Twin Towers – had died.

“It’s an emotional thing,” he says of the chance to be in New York on 9/11. “It’s the people we relate to. And we would have done the same thing, you know? Sometimes that kind of scares me that we would have done the same thing … It’s an important trip for all of us.”