Watsonville Fire Battalion Chief Almita Schaefer hung up her helmet June 4 on her final day as a firefighter with Watsonville Fire Department.
The Watsonville native has spent her adult life helping others, a reflection of how her family brought her up.
After attending the now shuttered Moss Landing Middle School and graduating from Watsonville High School in 1994, she worked for 10 years as a paramedic, and then switched over to be a firefighter in 2007.
She said she initially hoped to be a doctor, but a stint volunteering in a hospital emergency room convinced her that being a paramedic was more fitting.
“I decided I wanted to do something as well as medical,” she said. “I found that on calls I was only able to assist in one dynamic, and I wanted to do more.”
“Since Watsonville is my hometown I pursued it here,” she added. She is the first full time woman to hold positions of firefighter/paramedic, Captain and Battalion Chief.
“This career has been more than I could have ever asked for,” she said. “Any good recipe, anything worth enjoying has a lot of ingredients. It takes years and years for this particular moment to come to a point where I feel like it’s complete, where I feel like it’s not just something I’m doing. I started for a different reason. And I’m happy to say that I’m leaving with that accomplished.”
She added that she is leaving with “a continued sense of family. Being able to be welcomed by the fire department, the fire family at that age was really, really important to me. And through the years, that’s been the constant thread, that anytime I need something, they’re here for me. No one second guesses me here, or puts me down and it isn’t a competition.”
She says that one of the most “inspiring and special things” about being a firefighter is that no matter where you go on the fire engine or the fire truck, “someone’s always waving at you. I love to be friendly and so that was probably one of the most special things that this career gave me.”
She also noted that there have been “some really amazing women before me that were in the reserve program. Nobody signs up because they’re short or tall or gender or a certain kind of cultural background. That’s not what we sign up for: We sign up to help people and each other in that time of need. From week one, this department has always said, ‘She’s one of our family and that’s what we’ll always think of her as.”
