FDNY Battalion Chief Michele Fitzsimmons will likely be promoted to deputy chief on Friday, changing into the primary girl within the division to attain the rank. Ladies within the metropolis’s Emergency Medical Service have already reached this milestone.
Fitzsimmons joined the FDNY in 2001 at 31 years outdated after working for a corporation that handled HIV and AIDS sufferers.
She had at all times needed to change into a firefighter however hesitated when she was youthful after a dialog together with her grandfather Michael Fitzsimmons — an FDNY battalion chief who retired in 1968. Her great-grandfather, Charles Roth, was additionally an FDNY firefighter.
“When I was 13, the first women were going into the FDNY. I found that so exciting,” she recalled. “I remember telling my grandfather that I wanted to be a firefighter and he told me, ‘Women shouldn’t be firefighters.’”
FDNY Battalion Chief Michele Fitzsimmons will likely be promoted to deputy chief on Friday, Feb. 14, 2025, changing into the primary girl within the division to attain the rank. (FDNY)
That old-school considering could have delayed her, however didn’t deter her.
When she instructed her grandfather she had not solely taken the check however was going into the academy, her grandfather joked “I guess it’s not just the brotherhood anymore.”
However he rapidly championed her choice and cheered her on via her early years within the division.
“He had a super change of heart,” she recalled.
Fitzsimmons joined the division and was assigned to Engine 289 in Corona, Queens simply 4 months earlier than 9/11. Six members of her probationary class died within the terror assaults.
When she wasn’t combating fires, she was finding out for the subsequent rank. She rapidly moved up the ranks to lieutenant in 2007, captain in 2014, and battalion chief in 2020.
As head of Battalion 46 in Elmhurst,Queens she is at the moment the highest-ranking girl within the division, which at the moment has 177 girls firefighters out of a complete of about 11,000 firefighters and hearth officers. She’s the second girl within the division’s historical past to attain that rank. Her promotion comes months after Laura Kavanagh, the FDNY’s first girls commissioner, stepped down.
The primary girl battalion chief, Rochelle “Rocky” Jones, now retired, was one of many first girls to affix the FDNY in 1982. When Fitzsimmons heard she was being promoted to deputy chief, she reached out to Jones, certainly one of her mentors as she moved up the division ladder.
“She was thrilled for me,” Fitzsimmons stated.
Alongside the best way, her sister, Maura Fitzsimmons-Gibbons joined the FDNY in 2006 and is at the moment assigned to Engine 274. Her husband is an FDNY lieutenant in a HazMat battalion.
“I see her sometimes when I respond to jobs,” Fitzsimmons stated about her sister. “One time she was detailed to Manhattan and she was my driver.”
Firefighter Maura Fitzsimmons, proper, poses together with her sister, then-Lt. Michele Fitzsimmons, after Maura’s FDNY commencement ceremony at Brooklyn Faculty’s Whitman Corridor on Feb. 22, 2007. (Julia Xanthos for New York Each day Information)
The FDNY’s gender barrier was smashed in 1982 when 41 girls turned firefighters after a historic federal gender-discrimination lawsuit.
The FDNY has struggled so as to add girls to its ranks since 1982. Fifteen girls graduated from the Academy in 2018, the most important variety of new feminine firefighters since that preliminary 1982 class. There are at the moment 177 girls firefighters out of a complete of about 11,000.
In 2022, Mayor Adams named Laura Kavanagh the division’s first girl hearth commissioner. Kavanagh left the division in August.
When Fitzsimmons joined the FDNY, there have been 33 girls firefighters on the job, she remembered.
Her spouse, grown kids, and prolonged household will likely be within the stands cheering her on as she receives her promotion on Friday.
“My wife has made all of this possible,” Fitzsimmons stated. “She’s been there for me and carried the weight so I could study. I don’t think a person who’s got a family on this job can thank their family enough for all the support they get.”
Additionally cheering her on will likely be Hearth Commissioner Robert Tucker, who met Fitzsimmons on his first day.
“In the months since I have come to know her as a modest, professional, hardworking member of the FDNY,” Tucker stated. “Her promotion to Deputy Chief in Fire Operations is a glass-ceiling shattering event: she is showing women all over our city that the leadership possibilities at the FDNY know no end. I congratulate her on this milestone accomplishment, and I know she will stand shoulder to shoulder with the best chiefs in our department.”
As deputy chief, Fitzsimmons will oversee a full division of firefighters and personnel. It’s a rank she hopes will encourage girls already with the FDNY to take promotion checks.
“I want women on the job to know it’s possible,” she stated. “I think there are still women who don’t see themselves in that role, but it’s becoming more common.”
She hopes to encourage extra girls to maneuver up the ranks as the ladies at the moment on the rigs encourage younger ladies to change into firefighters, she stated.
“I think there are still women out there who don’t see themselves [as firefighters] but it’s becoming more common,” Fitzsimmons stated. “The ability to see women on the rigs doing the job. It makes it seem obtainable.”
