Sean Henning is the new guy - among several others - at the Jefferson City Fire Department, after spending four years as a firefighter in Mississippi.
The St. Louis native said being a firefighter has been his dream career since he was a child, and he enjoys helping people who are in a bad situation.
For the first two years of his career, he worked with the wild land fire crew out of Jackson, Mississippi, fighting wildfires in the Midwest and West Coast. Working for the wild land crew, he would be gone for months at a time mitigating wildfires and has been to nearly every state west of Kansas in his capacity with that crew.
"It was hard because I wouldn't be home for months at a time, but I got to travel a lot so that was really fun," Henning said.
Crews would usually dispatch out at the end of April, and most of what they would tend to were small - sometimes only 50-acre - fires.
After marrying his wife, Virginia, he wanted to spend more time at home and started working for a city department in the metro area of Jackson, Mississippi. Henning was with that department for two years before joining the Jefferson City department.
"My wife and I have a bunch of family in St. Louis and Kansas City," he said. "We wanted to get back closer to home. Our parents are getting older, and we wanted to be close to home. Getting back to Missouri was the goal."
He was slightly familiar with Jefferson City before moving he, but said so far he likes the area and the friendliness of the community.
At the JCFD, he works 24-hour shifts, and the majority of the calls are EMS-related. But the department also responds to car accidents, false alarms, gas leaks and oil spills, and performs fire inspections. About 20 employees are on shift at a time, and even when they're not running calls, they're typically pretty busy, he said.
Henning moved to Jefferson City with his wife and two dogs, Apollo and Steve.
On his off-time, he enjoys fishing, hiking and hunting.