Michael Halligan begins every morning the same way: pushing the snooze button at 5:15 a.m., drinking a cup of coffee and getting his two children ready for elementary school during what he calls “daddy time.”
Halligan then heads to his other home — the U where he has worked as fire marshal for 20 years.
“It’s not a job,” Halligan said. “It’s a place I want to be every day.”
As the U fire marshal, he juggles a number of responsibilities that have a common purpose — safety. He regularly holds fire inspections at campus buildings, inspects construction and provides fire-safety education for faculty, staff and residential students. He also checks for code violations, adopts guidelines that make campus safer and creates recommendations for pre-disaster planning.
Halligan also serves as the president and CEO of the Center for Campus Fire Safety and has delivered lectures on campuses across the country.
Marty Shaub, director of Environmental Health and Safety at the U, said Halligan is nationally recognized as a leading expert on campus fire safety and special event management.
“His love of the U and architecture background (makes) him a perfect fit for EHS,” Shaub said.
Halligan grew up in Richfield, N.J., which is about a 20-minute bus ride from Manhattan.
“I lived on a construction site,” Halligan said. “(Our) old Victorian house was a fixer-upper, and our family worked on it during the weekends.”
From early childhood, Halligan learned about work ethic from his parents. Once, his family was planning to take down a wall, but Halligan took it down by himself first. With a hammer in hand, he made steady and consistent swings until the tattered wall fell.
His learning, however, did not come without bumps and bruises.
“There were a lot of trips to the hospital,” said Leslie Park, Halligan’s younger sister who works as an adviser at the U. “There were lots of stitches.”
The marshall’s construction experience continued through high school, where his education went beyond the know-how of using tools and fostered a sense of appreciation of older homes. He also learned how a room’s function and design could be radically transformed. His family turned his childhood home’s sun porch, which they’d used for storing construction materials, into a kitchen with wooden floors and a refrigerator.
Halligan’s parents once told him and his two siblings that they were going to change the direction of the staircase. Over time, the turning stairway was made straight, going in the opposite direction.
“I didn’t think stairs could move,” Halligan said. “I then knew nothing was impossible.”
After high school graduation in 1983, Halligan looked at three possible colleges but was uncertain about where to go to school. One day during his visit to Utah, he walked around the U campus and came across two professors who greeted him. They helped him without any reservations, and the stalemate was broken.
At the U, he earned a bachelor’s degree in urban planning, followed by a master’s degree in architecture, specifically in building and fire codes for historic structures.
Originally, Halligan thought the U was going to be a place where he would get his education and that he would then retreat to the East Coast to start a family and career. Instead, he met his wife, Sue Kennedy, at the U and cultivated a burgeoning profession on campus.
“It was the best plan that went wrong in my life,” Halligan said.
Although he travels a lot for business, his family takes priority.
“He always makes a conscious effort to be there for his children,” Park said. “He never travels on their birthdays or special events like a piano recital.”
Halligan still walks around campus and comes across faculty, students and staff and helps them without hesitation.
“You can’t do fire prevention at the office,” Halligan said. “You have to walk through the buildings, talk to people and understand, for example, the research that is going on.”
As a result of this attention, Halligan is able to design fire safety features for complex structures like research buildings or tall buildings with large atriums connecting all floors.
“You look at each individual activity,” Halligan said. “Figure the risks, and you put together a mitigation strategy to minimize the risks of fire.”
Halligan observed many activities during the 2002 Winter Olympics such as creating rings of fire on ice. Halligan recounted how he had to work on tens of thousands of cubic feet of propane, ammonia and other gases held in cylinders stored at the football stadium.
A day before the opening ceremonies, the Secret Service informed him that they’d just changed President Bush’s route through the stadium. Since the new route traversed in front of the cylinders, Halligan relocated them under a choking deadline.
“It was a big project requiring a lot,” Halligan said. “But it’s not about me — it’s about the U.”
Jarad ReddekoppMichael Halligan, U Fire Marshal for more than 20 years, sits in his office in the Environmental Health and Safety Building. Halligan received his Masters Degree in Architecture, specializing in coding, from the U.