Palmer chief deploys to fight ‘secret fires’

PALMER — For the next six months, John McNutt won’t be fighting fires in Palmer.

But, he can’t tell you where in the world he will be.

“I’m doing firefighting, I just can’t tell you where I’m going,” the chief of the Palmer Fire Department said Thursday from his office at the city’s fire training center.

McNutt is with the Air National Guard and he’s being deployed for six months.

It’s the longest military tour he’s put in since he joined the guard in 1998 in Toledo, Ohio, and where he’s going is hush-hush and what position he’ll have hasn’t been decided.

“You get there and you kind of feel where everybody is and what their capabilities are,” he said of how duties will likely be assigned.

This will be his fourth time abroad, though. In 2001, he spent 10 weeks in the United Arab Emirates. That was just before the terror attacks that year. In 2005, he put in 10 weeks filling in for somebody in the UAE. Then in 2007, he put in four months offering fire protection to the Baghdad airport.

While he’s away, McNutt said, two chiefs will fill in for him. For the first three months, Dave Beyers will be in control. For the second half of the deployment, Todd Russell will run things.

“It’s something they don’t normally get to do, so this will be a chance for them to take the reigns and move the department forward,” McNutt said.

As for the chief, he said he’s mostly excited to be deploying, though he knows it will be rough on his family.

“This is the first time I have deployed from Alaska,” said the chief, who took over the department in 2009. “Back (in Ohio) we had family nearby.”

Like a lot of Alaskans, McNutt and his family operate without a whole lot of support from extended family like they had in Ohio.

“My parents lived 5 miles on the other side of town and her father lived not very far away,” McNutt said.

But one thing that will be nice — both for his family and for his fire department — is technology.

“If things go wrong I’m not unreachable,” he said.

It’s been amazing to see the evolution, McNutt said. During his first deployment he had to use a payphone. During his second, he was able to chat online in real-time. During his third he was video chatting.

“I was eating breakfast with the kids,” he said, describing how his wife set the laptop up at the breakfast table. “And I was just sitting in my tent at the Baghdad airport.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.