Suwanna Kerdkaew, who has risen through the ranks since 2002, says she’s determined to address the absence of women in the department highlighted in a 2020 [Santa Clara] civil grand jury report
Along the stairwell near
the lobby of the Santa Clara County Fire department headquarters in Los Gatos,
a row of photos line the wall of the former chiefs spanning back 75 years.
All of them are men.
On April 19, Suwanna
Kerdkaew broke that all-male streak when she became the first female,
Asian-American and LGBT fire chief to lead the county department and its over
200 firefighters.
Kerdkaew’s ascent to the
role comes at a trying time for the fire department as it deals with
pandemic-related staffing shortages and prepares for the momentous challenge of
battling the region’s wildfires that have left California skies chock full of
smoke in recent years.
Kerdkaew also enters into
the role as fire departments around the Bay Area are being scrutinized for
their lack of female firefighters. A December 2020 Santa Clara County civil
grand jury report blamed the absence of women within the ranks at the county
and three other fire departments in the county on poor recruiting techniques,
gender bias and a lack of inclusivity.
In an interview during her
second day as chief, Kerdkaew said that while the county fire department has
made progress in some areas, there’s room to improve. And she’s determined to
push the recruitment of women even further.
Currently, women make up 6
percent of the county firefighting force of 211. The number is slightly higher
than the national average of 4 percent, according to the National Fire
Protection Association.
“It’s a dangerous job,”
Kerdkaew admitted. “But I do want to push out there the ability for women to
know that, if you are physical and that’s what you like — the physicality of
the job — you can be successful and actually rise to the ranks in this career.”
Born in Bangkok, Thailand
in 1967, Kerdkaew and her mother were brought to Riverside County by her step-father,
a Vietnam War veteran. In high school, she ran track and played a lot of “sand
lot” softball. But she was never part of any organized sports since her family
didn’t have a lot of money, she said.
From the start, she was a
trailblazer. She became the first in her family to graduate college, earning a
bachelor’s degree in biology from San Jose State University in 1997. During
college, Kerdkaew worked at a UPS center in San Francisco loading packages from
trailers onto railcars. She was one of two women working among 70 men at the
worksite, her first experience in a male-dominated work environment.
While in college, Kerdkaew
said she briefly considered becoming a firefighter, but the lack of women
discouraged her.
“I hadn’t seen very many
women, if at all,” she said. “I thought, just stay on this path, get your bio
degree, and then go from there. Because if you don’t see it, you don’t know
that you can.”
That view would change
after Kerdkaew, as part of her training as an emergency response worker at the
biotech company Genentech, got a ride along with San Francisco’s fire
department.
“(I) got hooked,” said
Kerdkaew.
The fire chief then
obtained her EMT and fire science certifications before entering into and
eventually graduating from the county fire academy class of 2002.
Shay Mountford, a
firefighter engineer with the county who was also part of Kerdkaew’s graduating
class, said she was grateful when she saw another woman within the academy. The
two were also the first openly gay women within the county fire department.
“Being a female in the
fire service can be initially intimidating,” said Mountford. “I was relieved to
have Suwanna in there. I also had someone who was gay who understood our
lifestyle, her struggles, my struggles.”
Denise Gluhan, who also
graduated with Kerdkaew and Mountford in 2002, echoed similar remarks about
being a female in the job, but said that the environment wasn’t always the
easiest to be in.
“As a woman, you don’t ask
for help to pick things up,” said Gluhan, who retired in 2018. “Because then
they’ll say, ‘Hey she can’t do the job.’ You’ll push yourself. And I’m not
going to speak to some of the comments that I’ve been privy to, but it hasn’t
been supportive. (Kerdkaew’s) really had to prove herself outside the fire
department. Her skills, her productivity is why she is there. It’s not a
personality contest.”
Kerdkaew has been
determined to make a mark on the county fire department, past colleagues said.
Kerdkaew immediately went
back for more schooling to become a paramedic. In 2011, she graduated to become
a captain — a career highlight, she said.
It was also as a captain
that Kerdkaew experienced one of the most intense moments in her career.
In 2014, Kerdkaew and her
crew were assigned to the Lodge Lightning Complex fire up in Mendocino County.
At one point, Kerkaew and her team went up on a ridge when things turned south.
“A spot fire below us blew
up,” she recalled. “And what happened was complete area ignition. Usually you
can see the fire coming and you can go, oh, okay, here it comes. Where with
(this) just everything caught fire at once.”
A total of nine
firefighters had to be evacuated from the scene that day because of burns to
their hands or face, she said. And Kerdkaew wondered whether it would be her
last deployment.
“My daughter was seven at
the time and honestly, I didn’t know if we were going to go home that night,”
she said. “In that instant, I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
After the incident in
Mendocino County, Kerdkaew returned to county fire department office in 2015 as
the manager of the department’s emergency medical services program and then
eventually became a battalion chief.
In 2018, Kerdkaew became
deputy chief then acting assistant chief in 2021.
Today, Kerdkaew now heads
a fire department serving close to a quarter of a million residents in the
cities of Cupertino, Los Altos, Campbell, Los Altos Hills, Monte Sereno, Los
Gatos, Saratoga, Redwood Estates, as well as the county’s vast unincorporated
areas. She lives with her partner Tina M. Yun and the two have a 14-year-old
daughter Alex.
The Mercury News
By Gabriel Greschler
May 4, 2022
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