After many years of responding to floods, fires and winter storms, Don Jaquish is retiring next week as Essex County’s emergency services director. So far, no one has been hired to succeed him, but the county is working on that.

Jaquish has been at the hub of where bad news comes in. Now he’s going to be at the hub of where boats come in. He, his brother and his son bought the former Van Slooten Marina in Port Henry and are reopening it as the Bridgeview Harbour Marina. He will run it as harbormaster.

“It’s time for me,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones. I’m gonna unplug from this business. I’ve had enough.”

Jaquish, 67, started with Essex County Emergency Services as a volunteer fire investigator in 1981 and was hired in 1998 as coordinator of the enhanced 911 system. In 2001 he was promoted to deputy director of the department, and he took over as director in December 2008 when Ray Thatcher retired.

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Tricky hiring process

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Jaquish’s last day on the job is Wednesday, March 31. County Manager Dan Palmer said Deputy Director Max Thwaits will be in charge of the department on an acting basis until someone is hired. Thwaits said he plans to apply for the director job.

Palmer said the hiring process begins with documenting who does what in the Emergency Services department.

“We always do that when we’re changing a department head,” Palmer said. “If we were going to reorganize the department, we might do that.”

Palmer said the county will conduct interviews, but it could probably only hire someone provisionally for now. Hiring a permanent successor to Jaquish will take a while, Palmer said, because that job is one of two in the county that falls into the state’s “competitive” class; the other is the director of weights and measures. That means the state creates a test applicants must take, and the county is only allowed to hire one of the top three scorers of that test.

Palmer said the county will likely have to wait a year or more before it even gets that test to administer. With such a time lag, the county might be tempted to hire a director provisionally — Palmer said that could happen as soon as April — but if that person doesn’t score in the top three, that person can’t get the job long-term.

Meanwhile, someone who does score in the top three might not always be a good fit. Palmer noted that the county recently went through this competitive process and hired a weights and measures director, who resigned after two weeks. Now the county has hired a provisional director.

Palmer said it might be possible for the county Board of Supervisors to pass a local law changing the emergency services director position to a “non-competitive” class.

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The job

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With a staff of 13, Jaquish called his emergency services department “one of the biggest north of Albany.” He said its 911 dispatchers not only get calls from Essex County but Hamilton County and parts of Vermont. “They bounce off our towers,” he said.

He said the biggest emergency during his time as director was when Hurricane Irene soaked the mountains in late August 2011, sending a devastating torrent of water ripping through the AuSable River and its tributaries. It destroyed houses, bridges, firehouses and roads, including state Route 73, which connects Lake Placid and Keene to the outside world.

“It rained 10 inches in the High Peaks, and all that water has tremendous kinetic energy,” Jaquish said. “It’ll go down the stream, and then it’ll get all jammed up … and then it builds up until it breaks the jam it made, … and then it comes on through like a freight train.”

The emergency response went on for weeks, during which Jaquish said he hardly saw his family and didn’t get much sleep. He said he and his staff were at the emergency operations center in Lewis for 21 days straight.

With Essex County being mountainous and set on Lake Champlain, floods, snowstorms, wilderness rescues and ice rescues are some of its characteristic crises. Jaquish told of an ice rescue this weekend in Crown Point: People from Louisiana and Albany fell through while walking 300 yards out on Lake Champlain, as the warm sun was busy thawing winter’s freeze.

Jaquish said the incident highlighted a change he’s seen in his 40 years in this business: Firefighters, police officers and other agencies work together better than they used to. In the ice rescue, he said, “You had a DEC ranger, two troopers, a sheriff’s deputy and two firefighters all pulling on the rope to get the guy off the ice. Now that’s teamwork.”

Like any emergency services department, Essex County’s also has plenty of fires to deal with. It is responsible for investigating them, working with 24 volunteer fire departments. Jaquish called firefighters the county’s “boots on the ground” and “the very fiber of emergency services.”

He advised his future successor that “The life of an emergency manager is 24 hours. … You really need a deputy you can depend on, but even then … It’s very trying. It’s trying on you, and it’s trying on your family.”

On the other hand, he added, “It’s certainly never mundane and never boring. You never know what you’re doing next or where you’re gonna be. You can plan, but it’s always, the best made plans often go askew. We have great people who work for us, though — outstanding.”

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Lake life

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Jaquish still lives where he grew up, in the town of Moriah. He started sailing in earnest in his 20s and still gets excited when he talks about it. He seems to be looking forward to running the marina, which will serve both motorboats and sailboats.

“Being on the water does restore you somehow,” he said. “Lake Champlain is a beautiful lake to sail on. It’s probably one of the best. It always has good winds.

“There’s something about getting the sails just right, and the boat … just shoots along on its own on the wind. You’re flying on the water.”