The esteemed Mr. John Keough joins us to discuss a forthcoming documentary he’s producing alongside director Tommy Dyer called “Burnin’ Down The House.” Set for a May 21 premier, then a full theatrical release shortly thereafter, the feature length documentary examines the sorry state of firehouses in three Massachusetts towns, asking “what the fuck?” (paraphrasing). While listeners of this show are more likely to know Keough as the scrappy This Week In Worcester reporter breaking stories left and right—the substance of our last talk on here, Episode 18: Dog-Bite Ratios (ft. Tom Marino and John Keough—he’s also the president of the Hollywoot Film Group, where he “does movies” and other related things I half understand. Follow the film’s Instagram for updates as release day approaches.
Chris has more to say on the substance of the talk down below, but first I come to you hat and hand asking for a small amount of your hard earned money so that Chris and I and everyone else at Worcester Sucks can keep doing all the local journalism we do. Paid subscriptions are best, second best are tips, third best is merch orders.
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Chris here: A thing we talk around a lot in this is the dynamic of firefighters and the communities they serve vs. police and the communities they serve. I wanted to say two things:
First, firefighters put their turnout gear just as fast for a fire in the poorest neighborhood as they do the wealthiest one. In fact, they maybe do it faster for the poorest one. People say fire doesn’t discriminate, but that’s not entirely true. Fire discriminates in insidious ways- It discriminates in your landlord not noticing or caring that your boiler or wiring are pretty janky, because your landlord doesn’t have to live there. It discriminates in how dense your housing situation is, and how fire suppressed it is to the standards of that density. It discriminates in who lives in housing units that aren’t even legally habitable units, as we saw on Gage Street. It discriminates in how adaptive to escaping a fire your housing is if you’re disabled and/or have mobility issues. It discriminates in how fucked you are if you survive a fire and have to deal with the financial ruin that a fire inevitably causes. Etc. The theme of this one for me is I could go on but I won’t.
Second, I have this weird lived experience where I have been on the scene of hundreds of fires, first as a firefighter, next as a Disaster Services volunteer for the Red Cross, and finally as just what is known as a “buff”, or a person who loves watching and documenting a fire department at work.
If you know what you’re doing, you can get very, very close to the scene of most working fires. Don’t put yourself in a dangerous position and don’t impede the firefighting operations, and you can get close enough to feel the heat and have your eyes burn with the smoke. UDizzy1969, who comes up in the episode, has nearly all-access videos from almost every fire of consequence in Worcester for years. One of our unsung heroes tbh.
Back when I was learning about how to navigate a fire scene as a “non-combatant”, I remarked to a photographer who was a retired firefighter about how close they let us get. He said “Firefighters do a job to be proud of, and they are very proud of what they do”. I never forgot that. Who wouldn’t be happy about being documented doing the “public safety” job they do when it’s rescuing people and putting out fires and pulling people out of wrecked cars and all of that. I’ll leave it to you to compare and contrast that to another division of alleged “public safety”, and how transparent they are about letting random people document their work.
Last Call Foundation
IAFF (the main firefighter’s union) calls for a federal investigation into fire apparatus price-fixing
MA, NY Firefighters File Lawsuit Over PFAS In Firefighting PPE
If you want to get pumped up by watching another amazing firefighting documentary, here’s “Burn” (2012) in it’s entirety.
“Burnin’ Down The House” documentary on Instagram, and Facebook
Intro by Bill Shaner 3.30.26
Outro: “Burnin’ Down The House”, cover by Bonnie Raittv
