Close Up
Calvin Worthy knows the drill
Before joining the UB staff four years ago, Calvin Worthy spent 25 years with the Buffalo Fire Department. Photo: Douglas Levere
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“I’m so familiar that when I walk into a building, people assume that they’re getting ready to have a drill.”
He’s a familiar presence outside every campus building, with pad and stopwatch in hand. When he arrives, people start leaving in a hurry. But that goes with the job.
“I’m so familiar that when I walk into a building, people assume that they’re getting ready to have a drill,” says Calvin Worthy, emergency drill coordinator and safety inspector. He arranges drills for buildings on each campus three times a year, four for dormitories and public assembly areas.
These are more than your standard-issue fire drills. “Now, it’s more along the lines of emergency preparedness,” explains Worthy. “It could be a chemical spill, a terrorist attack or a disgruntled student that would either require a building to be evacuated or we would shelter (the occupants) in place. It piggybacks on Virginia Tech and all the other universities that had problems in the past to keep the occupants of a building out of harm’s way.”
As a member of Environment Health And Safety Services/Team Fire, which includes William Revalas, James Guy, Lynda Burey and Howard Wharton, Worthy feels that UB measures up in emergency preparedness with any university across the country.
“The only challenge is that our university is divided, whereas most other universities are in one particular area. But you do what you have to do to get the job done,” he notes. “We have a lot of older buildings but we make sure that they’re up to code.”
The other part of Worthy’s job is in safety inspection, which includes preparation for the annual campus fire inspection by the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control. “The (violation) numbers are really down. Everybody knows what the fire marshal is looking for. I give them pre-notice—if you have any of these violations, correct them as soon as possible. And it’s been working,” he says.
Worthy exudes a combination of affable warmth and dutiful coolheadedness in a career in fire safety and public service. Before his arrival at UB four years ago, he spent nearly 25 years with the Buffalo Fire Department, making headlines when he resigned his post as fire commissioner after taking a stand against proposed fire department cuts that he saw as hazardous to public safety. “I’d do it again today. What I predicted five years ago is now coming to fruition. It was never about me. I could have stayed there and closed all the firehouses that they wanted me to and took my paycheck and gone home. But I wasn’t sleeping well and I have a conscience. In my heart, I felt that I did the right thing,” he says.
Worthy was born and raised in Buffalo and resides in the city with Beverly, his wife of 25 years. The self-proclaimed “average Joe” relaxes with yard work and spending time with his close-knit family, which includes son Calvin, a welding inspector, and daughter Jasmine, an industrial engineer who graduated from UB in May. “I had a stake in this university,” Worthy smiles. “I had to make sure it was safe.”
That encompasses his mission now: “Basically [being] out there on campus in any building on any given day, walking around, making sure that everything is safe, making sure that if anything does happen, we would be able to evacuate the building in a timely fashion, being more proactive than reactive.”
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