According to a report from WCAX, for the first time in the history of the Burlington (VT) Fire Department (BFD), two women—Gina Gulia and Jenny Bronson—are now riding the same apparatus at the downtown Burlington fire station.
Gulia and Bronson head the A-1 ambulance on the B-shift. Of the 80 BFD firefighters currently working, five of them are women, and all five are on B-shift downtown.
For Bronson, she had long wanted to become a firefighter, and made the leap after a 20-year career as a professional trainer. However, there was no precedent for female firefighters in her life growing up.
Gulia, a Connecticut native, she was looking for the camaraderie and physical demands that firefighting eventually offered her. Being a firefighter was a career path she started considering while still in high school.
Neither Bronson nor Gulia feel that being female makes them any less capable as first responders. The women said that, despite being in a heavily male-dominated field, “the sky is the limit.”
