The Dearborn Fire Department has adapted their once popular fire explorer program into a fire internship.
Fire Chief Joseph Murray said the program has adapted throughout the decades.
“Throughout our history over the last few decades we’ve kind of done different things,” he said. “We did the fire explorers program with Boy Scouts to get younger people interested in the fire service. That kind of grew into what we called ‘fire cadets’ that were kids going through college to be firefighters or paramedics and they were unpaid and we actually ended up hiring a number of them.”
Murray said that in 2014-2015 he approached city hall on hiring the fire cadets for paid internships.
“It wasn’t until about 2014 or 2015, I approached city hall about hiring fire cadets for paid internships,” he said. “The police has a similar program which has worked out for them, so we started doing that.”