Page 59 - Wallingford Magazine Issue 52 Winter 2025

gency Services position in Wallingford. As
such, he is also the Emergency Management
Director of our town as well.

Another position that Chief Buck held from
2015 to 2024 is that of Emergency Manage-
ment Director for the Town of North Bran-
ford. His duties there included preparation
of the annual budget, the research and sub-
sequent application of reimbursement pack-
ages for federal and state Connecticut Emer-
gency Management and Homeland Security
grants.

There is much more we could outline about
the volunteer organizations he has served
on and other such experience in his chosen
field, but space is limited. The purpose of
going on at this length is to apprise Walling-
ford residents of how much knowledge and
experience our new Fire & Emergency Man-
agement Services chief has accumulated in
his 30-year career in so many areas of the
profession.

Now we turn to other subjects that he shared
when he was interviewed for this Wallingford
Magazine piece. Let’s start with two state-
ments he made concerning the Wallingford
Fire Department (and no doubt applies in all
the departments in which he has served). He
said when generalizing about the attitude of
the first responders under his administra-
tion: “In everything we do, every one of us
is focused on serving people.” The second
statement was that the members of the de-
partment are always asking themselves “Is
there more that we can do?”

He then described two recent examples to
illustrate these statements:

As of January 2nd of this year, under the di-
rection of Deputy Chief Sam Wilson, and us-
ing the increased financial resources provid-
ed in this year’s town budget by the Mayor
and Town Council, the department now has
two more members of the Emergency Med-
ical Service, enabling the department to as-
sign them to an 8am-4pm, Monday-Friday
shift. This time period has the majority of re-
sponses for EMS services. It is hoped that this
daytime shift will have two additional bene-
fits: 1) less reliance on mutual aid from other
ambulance services during this busy period,
and 2) even quicker response times.

Also very recently, the department is giv-
ing Ice Rescue training to some department

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