WARWICK — For the past 11 months, 21-year-old Warwick native Eaden Marti has been working with the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response Team combating wildfires and assisting with the national response to the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking from Montana after finding cell service one weekend in July, Marti shared his experience from his time working with the emergency response team as he nears completion of his term in August. He joined the team last September, after graduating from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts in May 2020.
“Right after college I was living in Boston and planning to do shows there,” Marti said. “Then with the pandemic, I wasn’t really able to continue performing.”
A professional magician and mentalist, Marti worked to adjust his performance craft for shows over Zoom and other platforms while venues couldn’t host audiences. While unable to perform for live audiences, he saw another opportunity to feed his other passion for firefighting, which is also a family affair.
Marti’s father, Zachary Marti, said his great-great grandfather and grandfather were both firefighters, though his own father was not. Beyond blood, he and his wife, Claudia Lewis, attributed their children’s volunteerism to growing up in the Warwick community. They moved to town from Granby in 2009, and were quickly drawn into volunteering in many parts of the community.
“Our house is right by the Fire Department, so it was easy for the kids to get involved in stuff,” Lewis said. “I guess, as (Eaden’s) parents, we should be more nervous, but we’re happy he’s pushing boundaries for himself.”
Marti spent nine years with the Warwick Fire Department after joining when he was 14. He said he was just 8 or 9 when his older sister, Nadia, joined as a junior firefighter. His father and Nadia are still active members of the Warwick Fire Department and now his younger brother, Emile, is a junior member.
Marti said he learned of the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response last summer through ServiceYear.org, an organization that connects applicants with service programs around the country.
“It was a time when I wasn’t able to perform like I had planned to and felt like it was a good time to try and give back,” Marti said. “I found AmeriCorps, and the emergency response team in St. Louis sounded the most appealing to me because it had the fire aspect. My main interest, aside from magic and performing, is firefighting.”
According to the AmeriCorps St. Louis website, the St. Louis Emergency Response Team was one of the first AmeriCorps programs to exist since the inception of AmeriCorps National Service, and has been operational every year since 1994. The Emergency Response Team program has three areas of focus: disaster response, environmental stewardship and wildland fire.
After his experience with the AmeriCorps Emergency Response Team, Marti said he is interested in continuing to fight wildfires. He said responding to brush and forest fires with the Warwick Fire Department prepared him with some transferable skills for this, including experience in high-stress situations. Members of the Emergency Response Team, and any fire department, must have the ability to function as supportive and dependable teammates, even in times of extreme stress and adversity.
“Anytime you’re dealing with fires it can be stressful. There’s a lot going on,” Marti said. “I think being with Warwick gave me a lot of experience, five or six years, in high-intensity and high-stress situations.”
Weather is also a large factor when combating wildfires, Marti said, recalling one day when a strong gust of wind caused the flames to jump their fire line. The firefighters raced up the hill, digging into the ground to cut it off again. In addition to the high mental stress, these scenarios are very physically demanding.
“It’s one of those things that’s harder to do as you get older, and you have to move away from it, because it is so hard on your body,” he said. “So right now, at this point in my life, it feels like a very good time to be pursuing this.”
Emergency Response Team members must be in excellent physical condition for the entirety of their 11-month term, from mid-September to mid-August. The baseline level of fitness includes being able to pass the wildland firefighter pack test — completing a 3-mile walk carrying a 45-pound pack in under 45 minutes. When responding to fire calls, duties typically involve digging hand lines or managing prescribed burns to help rejuvenate parts of the forest and limit the ability for wildfires to burn out of control.
When not responding to natural disasters, the Emergency Response Team functions as a conservation corps that assists the Missouri departments of conservation and natural resources, the U.S. Forest Service and organizations with various natural resource projects, including trail building and maintenance, habitat restoration, invasive species removal and prescribed burning. The multi-functional rapid deployment team has also been called to respond across the country to floods, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, search and rescue, ice storms, terrorist attacks and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With COVID, we ran mass vaccination sites for about a month or two in April and May (2020),” Marti said. “After that, we transitioned to get ready to head out to Montana.”
Throughout the year, Marti and the rest of the Emergency Response Team answered calls to fires at national forests and other locations in California, Missouri, Illinois and Montana. He spent the week of July 12 working with the U.S. Forest Service in the Tobacco Root Mountains in Montana.
Assuming COVID-19 health safety restrictions are lifted to allow for it, Marti is hoping to return to performing in Boston and Warwick during the fall and winter. He’ll spend half the year satisfying his itch to perform, before returning to seasonal wildland firefighting. He is already applying to firefighting jobs for the spring. He said his ideal job would be working on a helipad crew responding to wildfires, and that he wants to gain experience in search and rescue.
Marti said that, unfortunately, wildfires are only expected to get worse due to climate change. He pointed out that Massachusetts has even been affected more in recent years, citing forest fires on Tully Mountain in Orange and Joshua Hill in Leverett last summer. He hopes he can help the Western Massachusetts Hand Crew during his time back home.
“I hope that more people my age will get interested and join this sort of thing,” Marti added.
Zack DeLuca can be reached at zdeluca@recorder.com or 413-930-4579.