SANFORD — Stephen Cutter and his wife Paula bought an old 1800s house in West Newbury, Massachusetts a few years ago and started putting it back together again. He retired from his job as Newburyport fire chief early in 2013, but kept his hand in with the fire service as a call lieutenant for the fire department in West Newbury.

Then, not long ago, he learned there was an opening for an assistant fire chief here.

“I figured it was a great opportunity,” Cutter said Wednesday. “It seems like a great group of guys and gals here, and being part of that is pretty exciting.”

He’s now the second-in-command at the fire department, where Stephen Benotti, whom Cutter has known for 30 years, was named chief in June after serving as assistant chief for several years.

He was sworn in by City Clerk Sue Cote on Tuesday at the city council meeting and earned a standing ovation from upwards of a dozen firefighters who turned out for the event.

And if you said the fire service runs in his blood, you’d be right. His great-grandfather was fire chief in Newburyport, and his grandfather served as assistant chief. His father, John, was fire chief, two brothers are firefighters, and he has a nephew in the fire service elsewhere in Massachusetts.

“I hung out at the fire station as a kid,” he said in an interview Wednesday. He’d ride along on calls with his father, and completed tasks like repacking fire trucks after they returned to the station from a run.

In Sanford, Cutter will oversee fire and emergency medical operations ”“ “Everything from training to daily operations to building and vehicle maintenance,” he said. He’ll also serve as incident commander at fires if the chief is absent.

The departments of Sanford and Newburyport share some similarities, and some differences. Newburyport’s population is smaller than Sanford’s by a few thousand, and has two stations to Sanford’s three. The Newburyport Fire Department operates with 34 full-time staff and about a dozen call firefighters, while Sanford’s operates with a staff of 45 and 12-15 call firefighters. Newburyport’s territory was eight square miles, Sanford’s, about 48 square miles, Cutter noted. The biggest difference is in the emergency medical side of operations: Sanford’s rescue vehicles make many runs each day. Newburyport did not maintain an ambulance service, but ran fire engines to support medical calls, Cutter said.

Cutter didn’t set out to make firefighting his career. He graduated from Newburyport High School in 1977 and set off for the University of Maine to study biology, but it wasn’t for him and so he departed after a year. He moved back to Newburyport, started as a call firefighter in 1978, became full-time in 1979 and worked his way up through the ranks to shift commander, and then became chief. Along the way, he earned an associate’s degree in fire science and a bachelor’s degree in business management. He’s a paramedic and has been heavily involved in a hazardous materials teams in Massachusetts, including a maritime response team, a wildfire crew sent to battle fires in other parts of the country, urban search and rescue, and a whole lot more. At one time an avid skier, he was a volunteer with the ski patrol for several years at Sunday River.

Cutter and his wife Paula, who has roots in Sanford, will be moving to the area soon.

When he’s not busy in the fire service, he and Paula garden at their home in West Newbury; one of his four grown stepsons brews beer, so they grow hops, keep a dozen chickens and have a yellow Labrador retriever and a pug that he said “keep us entertained.”

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or [email protected].