2025 Blue KC Answering the Call Honoree John Heffernon
Servant-Leader
Overland Park Battalion Chief John Heffernon was called to be a firefighter. He just didn’t realize it.
After graduating from the University of Kansas, he was working in his father’s restaurant. He knew that wasn’t his future career. He wanted something more stable, because he and his wife had one daughter and she was pregnant with their second child.
He was looking for something where he could work outdoors and do something different every day. He also wanted a job with benefits and job security.
“It wasn’t a lifelong dream or anything like that,” he said about being a firefighter. “I never knew a firefighter my whole life.”
But on his first call after signing up for the Overland Park Fire Department, he knew he had found that calling.
“I don’t think I really understood it until I helped that first person,” he said. “I don’t remember the specifics of my first call. It wasn’t anything earth-shaking, but I walked away from it thinking, ‘I just helped that person.’”
Heffernon joined the Overland Park Fire Department in 1999. He started as a firefighter and steadily worked his way up through the ranks—lieutenant, captain and now battalion chief.
Through the years, he’s had that feeling countless times. Sometimes he helped save someone from a burning building. Other times, his help was less dramatic.
“After I got into the fire service, I realized that it wasn’t just a job, it was a calling,” he said. “The career is a good, stable career. But I’ve learned in 26 years that it’s more about helping people.
“When we get a 911 call, it’s from someone at the end of their rope. Many times, they don’t know who else to call for help.
“Sometimes it’s pretty straightforward. They need an ambulance. But other times they just need help trying to figure out how to turn the water off at their house because their basement’s flooding. They call us, and we come and solve their problems.”
That desire to help people, and the fact that he has spent 26 years fulfilling that desire, is why Heffernon is the June recipient of the “Blue KC Answering the Call” award, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City and benefitting The Battle Within. The Battle Within is an organization that helps former military personnel and first responders cope with the sometimes-hidden trauma of their careers.
Heffernon has been a member of the peer-support team at the Overland Park Fire Department and for the Johnson County critical incident stress management team for more than 20 years. Not every wound is visible, and not every emergency involves imminent danger.
The peer support team, like The Battle Within, helps treat those hidden wounds and brewing dangers deep inside the soul.
Heffernon’s job as battalion chief is now more about helping the people he works with every day. He’s responsible for three two-company fire stations, plus an EMS squad house with two people every day. He still serves the public, but also the people who work with and for him.
“We experience a lot of the same things—maybe not to the same level—that the military and police officers experience,” he said. “I have nothing but respect for all of them. But we see a lot of the same things.
“We’re just responding after the fact, where they may have been involved in the incident.
“We all wear this backpack throughout our lives. You fill it up with every incident. You fill it up with one rock at a time, until, if you don’t unload some of it with critical incident stress management or peer support, it can become overwhelming.”
After 26 years, Heffernon believes his primary responsibility is to teach those under him the right way to do the job.
“I think I was taught the right way to do the job,” he said, “and that’s to be a servant-leader.”
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