17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
(508) 228-1515
COURAGE UNDER FIRE
Nantucket Fire Department Captain Nate Barber exemplifies the best of Nantucket.
Nantucket's Person
of the Year
Nantucket is an island of remarkable people, but each year there is inevitably one person whose actions, deeds or accomplishments makes him or her stand out. As our first Person of the Year honorary, N Magazine has selected Nantucket Fire Department captain Nathan Barber for his heroism during the Veranda House fire. Barber was selected by the N Magazine staff after consultation with various members of the Nantucket community.
In the week after the fire, Nate Barber didn’t believe what had actually happened. He heard himself recounting what he remembered from that morning in July and worried that he might be lying. Was that what really went down? he thought to himself. Had he really climbed into a three-story burning building wearing nothing but street clothes and sneakers? Had he really kicked down doors, fought through flames and rescued people from the blaze? The scenes were vivid in his memory, almost like watching a movie. He could see himself doing all these things, but it felt like he was observing another person entirely. Amid the fire and chaos, a switch had flipped in Nate Barber’s mind not to think, but to act—and that made all the difference.
In the months since the historic Veranda House hotel burned to the ground, taking two other nearby buildings with it, Nate Barber’s heroism has been corroborated by the dozens of people who witnessed him in action firsthand. There was the hotel guest who Barber encountered first at the scene after he ran to the fire from down the street where he had just picked up coffee. Barber was trying to move the man back from the blaze, but he wouldn’t budge. He was struggling to communicate until he finally indicated that his son was in the burning hotel. “As soon as he said that, everything changed,” Barber recalled. “I felt obligated to find his son. I am a firefighter. I am in this situation. I had to do something.”
Barber tried to enter the three-story hotel from the bottom floor, but after getting through the door and finding the stairs, the smoke was impenetrable, blinding and suffocating. He returned to the street where the father was waiting for him. “My son is in room 224,” he yelled, pointing to the second floor. Barber instinctively grabbed a table and slid it against the side of the hotel. He leapt onto the table and then climbed up onto the first deck, from which he managed to hoist himself up onto the second-story deck. “There was a point, as I was climbing the roofs, thinking, ‘Wow, that worked,’” he recalled. “I was able to do it. I was able to do it the first time. And I remember thinking, ‘I guess I’m going to do this...because it’s working.’”
Barber jumped through a second-story window and landed on a bed. Opening the door to the hallway, he was met with another wall of smoke. He turned in the direction of the fire, making his way to a staircase where he heard voices. Two people were climbing the stairs. Barber yelled for them and led them to a window at the top of the stairs. Outside the window was another roof, where miraculously, a bystander named Peter Georgantas had managed to lean a neighbor’s ladder for them to escape. “Things just kept working out,” Barber reflected. “I got lucky. God’s will maybe. But things just clicked.”
After confirming that the man in room 224 had escaped safety, Barber proceeded to go room to room, kicking down doors, to make sure there was no one left behind before leaving the hotel. Despite severe smoke inhalation and exhaustion, he then joined his fellow firefighters who had since arrived on the scene, donned his turnout gear and began fighting the blaze.
“Nate jumping on the roof and through windows, that’s all just incredible acts of heroism,” said former Nantucket Fire Chief Steve Murphy who retired in September. “Containing it to what they did was a herculean feat. They’re all my heroes.”
This was not the first time that Nate Barber looked death in the eye. As a firefighter for the past fifteen years, he’s had at least two other terrifying episodes that still haunt his dreams. There was that flaming propane truck—“basically the biggest pipe bomb in the world”—as well as that fire at the Summer House three years ago when he found himself alone inside the building engulfed by flames. Yet perhaps his closest call came outside of the line of duty.
“When I was diagnosed with cancer, that was a really dark period,” he said. “Those first couple days were scary. My kids were in diapers at the time. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me and to them.” In 2019, Barber was diagnosed with seminoma, a form of testicular cancer, the cause of which was later connected to the fire-retardant chemicals in his firefighting turnout gear. (In recent years, a national campaign was launched by NFD Captain Sean Mitchell to rid this toxic gear from firefighters across the country. Mitchell pointed to Barber as the original inspiration.)
“That was a really challenging period of my life,” Barber said. “Emotionally and physically.” Much like his motivation to enter the Veranda House, Barber drew strength from a little boy in fighting his cancer. “I was in the waiting room and I was sitting next to an eight-year-old who had brain cancer,” he recalled. “The kid wasn’t crying. He was stoic. He was tough. And he made me tough. I looked at him and I thought to myself ‘I’m thirty-eight years old and I’ve had thirty more years of good health than this kid. If he can do it, I can do it.’”
Barber made a full recovery but never forgot the caregivers who helped save his life. During the early days of the pandemic, when Nantucket’s hospital and front-line workers were desperate for personal protective equipment, particularly face masks, Barber and his wife and extended family turned his woodshop into a mask-making operation. They sewed thousands of masks and helped launch an island-wide effort to fill the PPE gaps for front-line workers as well as the rest of the community. “You can rely on this community and lean on it,” Barber said. “My wife and I want to contribute to this community however we can, whether that’s being a firefighter or coaching baseball.” Or in the case of the pandemic, rolling up their sleeves and making masks.
In the months since the fire, Barber has received a number of recognitions and awards for his heroism, everything from the Eagan Maritime Lifesaving Award to a special congressional commendation presented by Representative Bill Keating to a personal visit from First Lady Jill Biden. “People have been really appreciative of not only what I did,” Barber said, “but what the entire fire department did that day.”
Indeed, the Veranda House was but one of many instances this year in which the absolutely critical role of the Nantucket Fire Department was put on full display. While the department managed to meet those demands, Barber worries that the island’s ongoing population boom will soon outmatch its capacity to respond. “Nantucket is not your small-town community that needs an EMT once and a while,” he said. “We’re servicing hundreds of thousands of people. We’re handling brush fires, dump fires. I think a lot of people think of Nantucket as a small town, but on Saturday in July it doesn’t feel that way.”
While the Nantucket Fire Department might currently lack in the quantity of its personnel, Nate Barber exemplifies their quality. Humble and self-effacing, Barber seems allergic to false modesty and is genuinely unaffected by all of the attention he has received for his valor. “I don’t think that my life has changed at all,” he said. “It’s nice when people look you in the eyes and shake your hand and say thanks. That’s more than enough for me. I feel appreciated in this town.”
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