ESS Perspectives: It is our honor to introduce Fire Chief Craig Aberbach, a member of our ESS team and a veteran firefighter and leader with over 30 years of emergency service from Florida to Idaho. Chief Aberbach was interviewed by ESS in October 2021.

After being involved in an accident during his first semester of college, Fire Chief Craig Aberbach became intrigued by a career in emergency services. He’d cut his foot badly enough that his friends called 911 and to his surprise firefighters – not the police – showed up first. They patched him up and got him comfortable enough to get to the hospital. As he recovered over the next semester, he began researching what fire service did and was particularly interested in the level of medical involvement they had in emergency response situations.

The following semester, Aberbach enrolled in the foundational courses for becoming a firefighter. He says the rest is history. That 30-year history includes serving as a fire chief in Florida as well as in Idaho, being director of the emergency medical services department at Edison State College, and training the next generation of emergency responders.
After graduation, Aberbach was hired by a growing fire department in Miami, Florida. “One of the values that was instilled in me during my firefighting training was to never stop educating myself within our profession,” Aberbach recalls. “I’ve always believed in bettering myself, and I continually use that goal of self-improvement as the gold standard to do my best job possible.”
Aberbach’s humble ambition enabled him to move through the ranks. At the same time, he also strongly believed in ensuring others had the same opportunities to learn and grow. “Once I achieved my instructor certifications, I had the opportunity to work at several fire academies training new firefighters,” he shares. “I continued my personal education and also taught higher-level courses and developed new classes for the fire service.”
Aberbach’s desire to help people was influenced by his parents who he saw volunteer for multiple organizations when he was young. He explains, “In fire service, people don’t call when things are going right. They call when times are at their worst and it’s our job to try to mitigate their suffering and make it go away. Each call we’re trying to bring comfort and compassion to the public.”
We are not alone is a central theme of Aberbach’s teachings. His leadership centers around the idea that firefighters have the same issues as other people and possess training to expertly handle critical situations and ultimately make things better. Aberbach challenges his team to ask themselves, “How can we make our jobs and lives safer?”
“Emergency services are inherently dangerous,” he adds. “They’re physically stressful and there’s mental fatigue which we also know to be harmful. We want to connect with firefighters through training in the latest technology and education on the best practices so they don’t second-guess themselves. As an instructor, we don’t know everything, but we collectively learn in our classes. There’s more than one right way to do things, and collaborating means we can assess opportunities for change which makes for a more successful organization in the future.”
Aberbach values the camaraderie inherent in his line of work. “You don’t want to keep things bottled up,” he says. “Talk with people you work with, share experiences, and know you’ve done the best you could. It’s important to know we can’t control the outcome of things that happened before we arrived, but that as a team we will proactively do everything we can.”
In 2005, Aberbach was sent to Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to help repair the local infrastructure that had been devastated by the storm. Water was running through the streets. Flooding and hazards needed to be cleaned up. Aberbach was appointed to head up a municipal government task force. Unrelated to official fire or police duties, Aberbach and his seven colleagues partnered with the City Attorney, repaired gas lines, and made sure the water system was operational again. He considers it one of the largest accomplishments of his career.
When the recession hit in 2008, Aberbach accepted early retirement from his Miami Fire Chief role and embarked on a two-year stint as director overseeing emergency services at Edison State College. While he holds education and training in high esteem, the 8-to-5 desk job was not where he felt his expertise was best used. He was thrilled to get back in the field several years later when he accepted a new role as Fire Chief in Hailey, Idaho.
Firefighting in the West held new challenges that Aberbach took in stride. He recalls during his interview when the mayor asked him how he’d adjust to fighting fires in the new climate, he said, “All fire burns at the same temperature.” That pragmatism served him well as he assumed leadership of a combo department that involved both paid and volunteer firefighters. “Every department needs as much support as it can get,” he reflects. “Lives depend on finding common ground and making it work. Each day in the station you don’t know if you have one person or 10-12 volunteers coming, but we bring a consistent work ethic that makes a difference for someone else.”
Aberbach estimates that 80-90 percent of the fire department’s calls are medically related. He explains that fire stations are more centrally located than other emergency services so they generally can get on scene minutes before ambulances. Accordingly, they usually begin working first.
One of Aberbach’s first fires that he responded to in Hailey hit close to home. It also underscored his transition to small town living from the large and more anonymous scene of working in urban Miami. The Idaho fire was a multistory fire in an old house that was called in by a firefighter in his department. Aberbach recalls the caller was calm as she assessed what resources were needed and explained the house was well-involved at that point.
“I realized once I got on the scene that it was her house,” Aberbach says. “There were difficult decisions because I personally knew the people involved. We had to pull everyone out of the house in the interest of safety all the while knowing that her possessions were burning up at that point. Lives are always more important than the house.”
Aberbach first encountered ESS eye protection in Florida when his department’s health and safety committee recommended they switch to traditional helmets. The new helmets came with ESS goggles. At some point they switched from ESS goggles to glasses which he enjoyed as well. As someone who wears prescription glasses, Aberbach continues to appreciate that the glasses don’t fog up – even while wearing masks and other additional PPD that is part of today’s COVID-19 protocol. His favorite pairs are the Firepro 1971 and 1977 which he uses for structure and wildfire.
“ESS allows me to be able to do my job without my prescription eyewear becoming a hindrance,” he says. He was delighted to learn that ESS was headquartered in Hailey because he’d enjoyed the product for a significant portion of his career and now he was a resident in their immediate community. One of the first things he did as Fire Chief in Hailey was to survey the department and ask their preferred personal equipment styles. The firefighters picked the traditional helmet style with ESS goggles, just like they had in Florida. The first responders selected ESS glasses.
Aberbach recalls a training drill that reinforced the importance of eye protection in fire and EMS services. “We were doing an extrication training where we used a hydraulic spreader to remove the door from the vehicle,” he says. “One spring unexpectedly let loose and hit someone right in the eye. They were wearing ANSI-approved ESS glasses that saved their vision. I was right there and could see that it was nobody’s fault that the spring came off like that. It’s just a great example of why we wear protective glasses. A lot of times we can’t control how things react in high risk situations, even in the controlled environment of a training.”

Chief Aberbach’s 30+ year career is a testament to what can be accomplished when first responders, fire, EMS, and law enforcement work together as a team to resolve an incident. He willingly shares preventative measures everyone can do to make their homes more fire safe including checking smoke detector batteries, getting carbon monoxide monitors, and making sure fire extinguishers work. He also recommends getting a professional inspection of heating systems since dust that can become flammable accumulates on the elements when they’re not in use over the summer. “We can make a difference and bring someone’s pain and suffering to a positive outcome,” he says. “For me, knowing I’ve done my best and leading my team to do their best is the ultimate reward.”