Trio of women blaze new trail while fighting fires for Starkville Fire Department

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) – On May 13th, Savanna Sanchez, Sarah Thompson and Anna Beth Robertson became the largest group of women firefighters to work a 24-hour shift in the history of the Starkville Fire Department.

“Just for little girls to see, hey there’s three girls working at the fire department right now. That’s pretty cool,” Thompson says.

The three women are also the most female firefighters the department has ever employed at one time.

“When I started my career (in Natchez) I had never met a female firefighter,” Sanchez says. “When I started, I was like the first female in that department in about 20 years.”

May 13th wasn’t just a historic day for the SFD, it was a busy one too. Thompson and Sanchez responded to seven calls that day, including 2 car fires.

“We actually had two car fires that we fought, I think in the middle of the night,” Thompson says.

“We all started out here in the morning and then I had to go to one of the outlying stations, so Savanna and Sarah kind of got all the excitement that day,” Robertson says.

Robertson is the rookie of the group and says she loves being able to lean on the two veterans for support.

“Any time we’ve done evolutions together there’s always something that I’ve been able to pick up on from them or something new that I can learn,” she says.

The three women have also gotten the opportunity to train together.

“At our Hot House at Station #3, there was one day where they put all the girls together and we had to do evolutions and we were able to keep up and do the same thing as everybody else,” Robertson says.

In addition to saving lives, they want to continue to show people what it takes to be a firefighter.

“You have to be quick-thinking on your feet, you have to be able to make spot-on decisions that could affect a large amount of people,” Sanchez says.

And that it has nothing to do with gender.

“To show the other women and young girls, this is something that you’re capable of,” Robertson says.

All three women say their 72 male counterparts have been like brothers to them and the environment at the SFD is like one big family.

“Fire doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, it doesn’t care if you’re small if you’re large,” Thompson says. “It doesn’t care at all.”