Chief Adrian Dillehay
When new Westfield Fire Chief Adrian Dillehay visits Aldine ISD schools to recruit students for the Fire Explorer youth program, he usually doesn’t find young people looking for cheap thrills or excitement.
“What I see are young people who have a need to help people and become law-abiding citizens,” Dillehay said. “Naturally, they all want to succeed. And when I talk to them about my family and how I grew up here, I see a part of myself in them.
“But I also see them thinking ‘he’s not only a firefighter, but he became the fire chief.’ ”
Dillehay, 36, is a graduate of Aldine Nimitz High School, where he was a star centerfielder with a .440 batting average who went on to play baseball at New Mexico State College. When his baseball dreams ended after just a year thee, Dillehay returned home feeling dejected and lost.
An old friend from his East Aldine neighborhood – a firefighter nicknamed “Radio” – told him to snap out of it, get some work boots and show up at the old Westfield Volunteer Fire Department Building one morning at 7 a.m.
Dillehay did as he was told and found himself helping to remodel an old bathroom in the firehouse, in between riding along as the firefighters answered a series of calls ranging from grass fires to medical emergency calls.
Seventeen years later, he’s still there, after earning his firefighters certificate, an EMT certification from San Jacinto College, working for the Houston Fire Department and as a volunteer.
Dillehay, married and the father of a young son, was named fire chief in January. He replaced veteran Chief William Goodroe.
The Westfield Fire Department, an unusual combination of volunteer and paid firefighters, is funded by a 10-cent property tax and serves 45,000 residents of northeast Harris County. It’s overseen by a five-member board of directors.
The East Aldine Management District board of directors recently approved a $12,000 grant to fund equipment for the Explorer Fire Fighter Post that Dillehay leads. He started the community outreach program in 2015.
“I think I can relate to the struggles so many of these kids face, because when I came home from college from playing ball, I felt like a failure. I felt like I had let down a lot of people,” Dillehay said. “The game of baseball is what had carried me up to that point in life. But that fear of failure is what drove me to overcome all the challenges I later faced.”
Some of the previous Explorers he recruited have come back to work for the department.
“Right now, my communications captain is a guy I recruited 10 years ago from MacArthur High School,” Dillehay said.
The structure of the department has contributed to its success, Dillehay said.
“They talk about brotherhood in the fire service all the time, and in my opinion, that’s sometimes just a lot of smoke,” Dillehay said, with a laugh. “But here, the people I work with are not my employees, they are truly my brothers and sisters.”
Another key difference in the Westfield Department is the simple fact that it is located in, and made up of a lot of people from, East Aldine, Dillehay said.
“What is it about East Aldine? “I don’t know – sometimes I think it’s the water,” Dillehay said. “Not really. I think it comes from being a working-class community.
“When you come from a lower-income area when you’re going through what I call ‘the struggle,’ it brings you closer together. Everybody knows what you’re going through, and so you can relate to one another.”
Dillehay recalled the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
“We went through an almost Biblical flood, and the water receded when the storm was over. And then what you heard out here was power saws and Tejano music, because they all came together to help each other,” Dillehay said.
“And that’s what makes this place special in so many ways.”
In addition to supporting the Explorers program, the management district recently supplied the fire department with $99,000 for new equipment.
— By Anne Marie Kilday
