New NOTL firefighter set on career path by experience at fatal accident

Some memories flicker like a dying candle, but for Tayler Rodrigue, there’s one that burns like wildfire.

Newly graduated from Niagara-on-the-Lake’s firefighter program, she remembers clearly what set her on the trail toward firefighting.

Two summers ago, she and her boyfriend Lorenzo Mazzuca, a firefighter, were driving home after watching the sunset with the family dog, Mickey.

They arrived on the scene of an accident in rural NOTL.

“We came across the aftermath. We had just missed the collision,” she said. A cyclist had been struck.

She recalls a bicycle tire on the road, a man in a nearby ditch and a distressed child with his dog trying to wave them down.

The boy was the victim’s son and she did what she could to comfort the youngster.

Rodrigue remembers watching her boyfriend perform CPR while waiting for emergency services to respond.

Despite Mazzuca’s efforts, the man died in hospital.

“I wanted to be on the helping side,” Rodrigue said, but at the time, she wasn’t.

“I had no training,” she said. “I felt a little bit helpless.”

It was not a good feeling, she said.

After hours of talking to police and emergency service workers, the couple returned home – well after midnight.

Rodrigue remembers the two said nothing to Mazzuca’s parents, with whom they were living at the time. They were asleep.

But that night, Rodrigue realized she wanted to be a firefighter.

And now, having graduated last month, she says, “If one of the police officers called me tomorrow and asked me to explain the entire situation (at that accident) from start to finish. I would be able to do that.”

When she was in high school, she wanted to be a paramedic, but instead “ended up going to college for border services.”

Rodrigue tried to do something with the diploma for a few years but never got her big break.

“I now realize that the first responder field I was meant for was the fire department,” she said.

Originally from Welland, she now lives in Glendale with Mazzuca and enrolled with the NOTL fire department last  summer, starting the program about a year after that fatal incident. 

NOTL’s volunteer firefighter training program is 300 hours of physical and mental commitment. Most recruits take about a year to finish.

The five-foot-three Rodrigue says it was a “little wonky” at first, being both the shortest on the team and the only woman.

Her co-workers were mostly tall and muscular and many were already friends who had grown up together in NOTL.

“But within a couple of weeks of doing training, we just kind of started all bonding,” she said.

The turning point, she said, came when they were practising the Denver drill.

The training exercise originates from the death of Denver firefighter Mark Langvardt, who died on the job in 1992.

After getting separated from his fellow firefighters, Langvardt became trapped between two filing cabinets on the second floor of a burning printing business.

It took his team almost an hour and multiple attempts to extract him. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The Denver drill was then developed to teach young firefighters like Rodrigue how to rescue their peers from tight places.

During a visit to the Glendale fire station, Rodrigue gave The Lake Report a behind-the-scenes peek at the props they use when practising the drill.

“This measurement is exactly the same measurements as the window they had to get him out of,” she said, pointing to a makeshift wooden window frame and attached plywood hallway.

The rescue takes four people, two working outside the window, and two working inside the hallway.

To hear Rodrigue explain it, the two inside work together to extract the distressed firefighter, and the two outside receive him.

Even with two people working together, a fully equipped firefighter is a heavy lift.

But with her small frame, Rodrigue sailed through the window effortlessly.

It elicited quite the laughter from her teammates, who had been struggling to lift each other out of the shoulder-wide hallway for the whole drill.

“Having a moment of laughter and fun, during this hard drill made the day a little bit better,” she said.

After that, “when it came time to more downed firefighter drills,” everyone wanted to be in a group with Rodrigue because she was the easiest to lift.

Outside the fire station, Rodrigue works as an insurance broker and volunteers as a cheerleading coach twice a week.

Despite needing the strength to pick up kids and throw them around at practice, she said her size and strength were a big challenge.

“I kept telling myself that that was a weakness,” she said.

There were days when she felt she couldn’t do the job because she was smaller than most.

But the advice of St. Davids’ district chief Dave Rigby kept her going.

“Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do this job, because you can,” she recalled him saying.

So, along the way, she learned to play to her strengths.

Rodrigue said her size allowed her to fit through small spaces better than others, a skill that came in handy given the six-foot frames of her peers. 

Whenever Rodrigue and her team had to squeeze through a tight space they would send her in first and follow once confirmed that the way was clear.

Between the physical training and all the studying, Rodrigue said she didn’t have much of a life for the past year.

“I didn’t realize that I was giving up all of my weekends.”

“Everyone would ask me to do something and I’d say, ‘I can’t, I have training.’ ”

She recommends that anyone who wants to fight fires should talk to people who have been through the program and make sure they can commit the time.

But to people who really want this, she says go for it.

“You’re never gonna know until you try.”