FITCHBURG — The Municipal Airport played an integral public safety role during the COVID pandemic, serving as a testing site that processed 1,946 people from Jan. 1 through March 31.
Twin Cities health and other officials decided to join forces and move testing sites from each city — Nursery Lane in Fitchburg and Doyle Field in Leominster — to the airport in January, where the state Department of Public Health-funded “Stop the Spread” collaborative site was open Monday through Thursday for anyone eligible with no cost.
“It was accessible to both Fitchburg and Leominster, so we combined and worked together and shared resources to make it work,” Fitchburg Health Director Steve Curry said. “Testing from October to January was hard to get and we were experiencing a surge.”
Leominster Emergency Management, Fallon Ambulance Service, Fitchburg and Leominster health departments, and more worked together to ensure the testing site ran smoothly. Interim Airport Manager Peter Kettle was also a key player.
“My involvement was to identify land available, if any, and then get approval from the FAA to have such an event on a Grant Assured FAA Airport,” Kettle said. “I drew up a schematic and sent to the FAA in Boston and also to MassDOT Aeronautics.”
He then discussed the proposal with Jorge Panteli of the FAA and Owen Silbaugh of MassDOT Aeronautics and approval was granted for a testing site at the Crawford Road airport, one of the busiest small general aviation airports in the region. Kettle reached out to Gary Withington of the Fitchburg Department of Public Works, “who put up snow fencing in line with the schematic to prevent attendees from entering the active airport,” and testing tents were brought in.
Kettle worked closely with Curry and Leominster Health Director Jeffrey Stephens to get the site up and running. When he was first called by Fitchburg Mayor Stephen DiNatale asking if they could bring the testing site to the airport, Kettle recalled that he “said no but would look at additional options.”
“Didn’t want sick people coming into the building,” Kettle said. “The rest is history.”
According to data collected by Mike DeCosta, Senior Director, Data Innovation for Fallon Ambulance Service, over 8,750 people were tested for COVID by both the Fitchburg and Leominster boards of health since they began offering the service in November 2021. There were 2,333 people with COVID detected and 191 were inconclusive.
“Testing is good public health,” Curry said. “Testing was crazy on Nursery Lane, which is why we moved it to the airport, but coincidentally cases were declining so it went well but wasn’t well attended in March.”
Curry said the testing was done by Transformative Health Care. When asked what advice he would give to people now as the pandemic is still very much a reality, he said “the pandemic is slower, thankfully, but it is beginning to pick up again.”
“I would say to live as normal as possible and do you best to live healthy and take advantage of vaccination clinics, especially those folks that are immunocompromised, and stay home if you are ill,” Curry said.
Stephens said at the end of March that it was “hard to believe it’s been five months of testing.”
“The first three weeks in January we tested around 100 people a day, in February it slowly declined,” he said, adding that the last week the airport testing site was open they only tested about five people per day.
“I am sure I can speak for Steve on this. We can’t thank you enough for partnering with us on this,” Stephens wrote in a March 30 email to Kettle. “It was a great service for the community and the site worked out extremely well. If we ever needed to mass vaccinate both Fitchburg and Leominster, that site would be the best option for the Twin Cities.”
He wasn’t the only one who had praise for Kettle and his role in securing the airport as a testing site and the overall success of it.
“We are certainly grateful to the Fitchburg Municipal Airport for providing a site that was ideal,” DiNatale said. “The testing sites we were utilizing created traffic flow issues and FMA stepped up to offer a site that allowed for a smooth transition for vehicles which enhanced our goal of testing as many citizens as possible.”
