Alna Fire Chief Mike Trask quietly celebrated 30 years at his department’s helm in 2024. The lifelong Alna resident said Maine really is the way should be and he cant imagine wanting to live anywhere else. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Born in Damariscotta and raised in Alna, Alna Fire Chief Mike Trask has quietly devoted more than half his life to the service of his hometown. Within the past year, he celebrated the 30th anniversary of his election as Alna’s fire chief and he returned to public office, beginning his second tenure as the town’s road commissioner.
Trask said he never gave a thought to rising through the ranks when he joined the Alna Volunteer Fire Department as a teenager. His father, Austin Trask, was a volunteer firefighter and among the crew who helped build Alna’s old fire station and community room at 1647 Route 218 in the 1970s. Mike Trask said he remembers tagging along with his father during construction and joining the department himself just seemed like a natural progression.
Austin Trask served as Alna’s fire chief from 1982-1989, when he was succeeded by Jeff Averill. Four years later Mike Trask was Averill’s assistant chief. The following year, 1994, Averill stepped down and the members of the department elected Trask to succeed him.
Trask was 23 years old.
“I don’t even know how I did it,” he said. “I wasn’t after the job, even then. The year before that, I was (Averill’s) assistant chief, so I had one year, and then Jeff said he was getting done. You know, my thought was, well, who’s going to be the next chief?
“I never said, hey, I’m the guy, because I never thought I was. There were several other guys capable of course, but they made up their mind who was going to be the next chief, and when they had the meeting that’s who they picked.”
At the time, Trask said he hoped to serve at least five years before stepping down.
“That’s all I could think,” he said. “If I could just get five years in, I’ll have done something decent. But, even to this day, still, if somebody really wanted the job, I’d give it to him. It’s nice, but if somebody wanted it, they could have it.”
While he professes to care little about actually being chief, he admits to caring a great deal about the department. Trask said he is devoted to training and his idea of leadership is to lead by example.
“If the chief goes to training, his members will go to training,” Trask said. “If the chief shows up every night, the members will show up every night. That’s how I think. If I can’t show up, how can you expect them to show up? So I don’t miss a Wednesday night unless it’s something big. I’m here, right? You know, most members had the night before Thanksgiving off. I was here, and there were things for me to do. It’s not wasted time. There’s always stuff to do.”
Currently the Alna Volunteer Fire Department has about 20 active volunteers, ranging in age from 15-87, all of whom are least trained to Firefighter I certification. Coming up with training exercises and keeping things interesting between calls is not always task, Trask said, but it is vital to ensuring the fire service operates smoothly and safely when needed.
“You’ve got to generate good training and that’s not always easy,” Trask said. “Before you can go in a burning building, you need to know how to pump the fire truck. You can’t go in the building if you can’t get the water out of the fire truck. I think a lot of people think, oh, all the glory is the guy who went in the building. Well, everybody sees that as the glory.
“The real glory is the guy pumping the fire truck, because without him, none of the other stuff happens. It all starts with him. So if you got a good pump operator, he knows what he’s doing; you’re in great hands. You should feel confident when you do go in the building, because you’ve got somebody that knows what they’re doing at the pumper.”
While he is a big supporter of training and safety, Trask echoes the comments of many his peers critical of a proposed Occupational Health and Safety Administration Emergency Response rule. Opened for public comment between February and July, the innocuously titled rule would replace OSHA’s existing Fire Brigades standard, adopted in 1980 a number of sweeping regulations intended to protect emergency responders from a wide variety of occupational hazards, according to regulations.gov.
According to Trask, the goal is laudable, but the if new standards are enacted as proposed, the regulations would add untenable financial and time-consuming burdens on small, volunteer fire departments like Alna’s.
Training and preparation is always good, Trask said, but the reality is every single firefighter doesn’t need every available scrap of training “just in case.” According to Trask, training that might prove useful for full-time professional firefighter may not be applicable at all for a volunteer firefighter who might respond to a limited number of calls in a given year.
“I think what you’re going to see is mass exodus,” Trask said. “The money is not the issue and I think too many people are wrapped up in the money. It’s not the money. It’s the people that you’re going to drive out of the fire service. Why does somebody, we’ll say 50 years old, want to go do all this extra stuff that they have to have, when they are quite capable of being a fireman with the training they have already? That extra training you’re talking about is not going to do anything for them.”
This spring, for reasons he’s still not entirely sure of, Trask successfully ran for office as Alna’s road commissioner, defeating incumbent Jeff Verney at the annual town meeting in March. Trask said he had no issues with Verney. The two men approach the job differently, and both approaches are equally valid, Trask said.
“I thought it would be pretty hard to beat the incumbent,” Trask said, chuckling. “Jeff’s family is well known in town and I don’t have one bad word to say about him. I just threw my hat in the ring and won.”
Trask said he has given some thought to running for the select board, but if he does so, it will be after he steps down from his fire department post. Because the Alna Select Board appoints the town’s chief, it would be a conflict of interest to hold both offices simultaneously, Trask said.
When he is not serving his town, or spending time at home, Trask works full time as a welder at Bath Iron Works in Bath. This is his third tenure with the company. Laid off from BIW on two previous occasions, Trask worked as a contractor, drove a school bus, and opened his own contracting business. Trask said he loved working for himself, but with a household to support, a salary with benefits seemed like a reasonable option.
When he is not working or volunteering, Trask likes to spend time with his family, his three children, Kateleen, 22; Riley, 21; and Austin, 18; and his long-term girlfriend Michelle Brooks.
“I’m more of a private person than people realize,” Trask said. “I’m not. I don’t really dig huge crowds of people. I like being alone. I live out in the woods. It’s quiet. There’s nobody there except my family, right? I’ve been happy there.”
Trask’s youngest son is enrolled at Washington County Community College in Calais and is planning a future in construction. Trask said he has joked about working for his son, but it is an idea he likes.
“You know, I bought the excavator and the truck and stuff with anticipation that this would happen,” Trask said. “His goal is to run his own construction company. So I joke with him and say, ‘Well, I’ll drive the dump truck when I get ready.’ Close to retiring, I’ll just drive the truck back and forth.”
A dedicated deer hunter, Trask said November is his favorite month of the year. He is skilled with firearms and has tried his hand at bow hunting and hopes to prepare his crossbow skills in time for next season. Asked what he likes most about hunting, Trask didn’t mention the actual hunt.
“I like the outdoors,” he said. “The walking through the woods; all the different things you see while you’re out in the woods. I like the terrain, the gullies; what the forest looks like out through there.”
Trask has made hunting trips to other areas of Maine, but his favorite hunting areas are in and around Alna. Besides, deer are so plentiful there is no need to go elsewhere, he said.
“I’ve walked most of this town,” he said. “I know the area up and down. I can tell you, well, there’s a lot of gullies in there. When you walk through, you’re going to be going up one hill and down the other, you know, things of that nature. I just remember it all, like there’s a lot of old foundations throughout the town. They’re nice. When you come across them, you check them out when you’re going through: just a lot of neat things out there to see and it’s quiet and peaceful.”
Trask has been moose hunting a couple times and harvested three moose, one as a co-shooter, but deer hunting is his passion, he said. Still he has a group of friends who all apply for permits together and split the costs and proceeds among themselves.
“Me and my buddies all put in for permits,” Trask said. “If we get picked, we all go, we all share in the cost, and everybody gets a percentage of the moose. So if there’s four of us, we all get a quarter, and everybody is in it. It doesn’t matter whether you shoot or not. We don’t care who shoots it, but we’re all there. Enjoy the fun, put the work in, and we all get a piece of the pie.”
Although he has lived the bulk of his life in Alna, Trask has traveled around the country and seen enough to know Maine is where he wants to be
“I absolutely love Maine,” Trask said. “It is what they say. This is the way life should be.”
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