Firefighter orchestrates scary situation to propose to his girlfriend
On Christmas morning, Amy Munk had her whole family over to open presents with her, her boyfriend Matthew Testa, and their three young sons. Testa had just left the house to run an errand when the carbon monoxide alarm went off, forcing them to evacuate.
“My family and I were all outside,” Munk tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I remember apologizing to them because I felt bad. I was like, ‘Merry Christmas, guys’ — kind of sarcastic, because it was my house and I just ruined everyone’s Christmas.”
She was pretty worried about what had caused the alarm, but then, when four fire trucks drove up, she thought it was a bit of overkill. After they stopped, she walked up to one of the trucks, and out stepped Testa, who got down on one knee and proposed.
Testa, a firefighter, his father James (the assistant fire chief), and fire chief Glen Thorman had orchestrated the whole thing.
“I just wanted [my proposal] to be different than anybody else’s, so we came up with using the fire department,” Testa said.
They got the 911 dispatcher in on it, and a group of firefighters were waiting at the fire house for the signal. Testa told Munk he had to go fuel up his fire truck and left the house just before his dad set off the false alarm.
“Carbon monoxide is odorless and tasteless, so realistically, nobody really knows whether it’s in your house or not,” Testa said, inadvertently fitting a public safety announcement into his story. “That’s a good reason to rush out of the house.”
In a big city, some might question diverting emergency resources to use for a marriage proposal, but in the small town of East Jordan, Mich. (pop. 2,300), it wasn’t too much of an issue.
“Earlier in the morning, we had three calls in a row, back to back,” Testa said. “If there was a real emergency, we would have just left and gone to the call, and figured this out another day.”
But no more calls interrupted Testa’s plan, which went forward without a hitch and certainly surprised Munk. She said yes, by the way.
Days later, the newly engaged couple got another surprise, learning that Munk is pregnant. The new baby means they’ll be pushing back their wedding plans until 2019, but when it happens, they will definitely involve their fire department once again.
“We’ll involve the people,” Testa clarified, “but it’s not going to be a fire theme or anything like that.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
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