- May 10, 2024
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After a year of unemployment, B.J. Cope and Gabe Bertola met while volunteer firefighting and formed a business.
For the past 1.5 years, B.J. Cope, a die-hard Red Sox fan with 17 years of experience in the staffing industry, and Gabe Bertola, a former nurse from South America, have been unemployed.
Immediately following their respective layoffs, the two became volunteer firefighters. One day into their first shift together, in April, they decided to become business partners. Two months later, Two Firefighters Landscaping LLC was fully licensed, insured and ready to go.
“The business was born out of poverty,” Cope said.
“(But) it’s not just about making money,” Bertola added. “It’s (about) feeding your family … It’s about survival.”
They wear matching red polo shirts with their company emblem sewn onto the right of their chests and their names embroidered on the left. They each keep copies of the other’s house key.
And they find a new kind of satisfaction by going to work every day in their new careers.
“I put 17 years of my heart and soul into something and then found out that I was doing the wrong thing all along,” Cope said. With four generations of firefighters in his family, Cope focused his energies on fire school after he was laid off. Today, he’s a certified fire officer.
Bertola moved here in 2002, from South America. After being laid off from his waste management job in New Jersey, he moved in 2009, to Palm Coast, to start again, for the second time.
“In my country, I’m a nurse,” he said. “I come here, and ... I’m unemployed.”
After months of trolling classifieds, they knew they wanted to be their own bosses.
“You win a war for you,” said Bertola, who recently won his precinct’s Most Improved Firefighter of the Year award. “You don’t win a war for someone else.”
Cope and Bertola are on call as firefighters 24/7 — they said so over the static hum of emergency scanners clipped to their belts. Once, during the height of the summer wildfires, they worked a scene for 24 hours straight. For another two-week stint, they worked the White Eagle fire, after the Division of Forestry took over the blaze in Espanola.
“We have pride and integrity,” Cope said. “Honor to duty. And that carries over into what we do … We’re not going to leave a blade of grass uncut … We go the extra mile, even if not asked … You have to do that as a firefighter.”
So far, every penny they’ve earned has gone back into the company.
“If we survive,” Bertola said, “we can help other unemployed people to come and join with us.”
But survival won’t be easy.
“I mean, landscaping is hard,” Bertola added, “but we have to find a job. And this is how we can make ourselves comfy, being outside.”
Cope agreed.
“We like the heat,” he said with a wink. “That’s a certain mindset to being a firefighter.”
