A question posted recently on Quora asked, “What should I know about becoming a volunteer firefighter?” Mick Mayers, a chief fire officer and instructor-trainer, gave his opinion on the topic below. Check it out and add your own thoughts in the comments.
Regardless of whether you are choosing to get into a career as a firefighter or joining the ranks of the 800,000 American volunteer firefighters, the fire service is an incredible community. Many people just see firefighting from the aspect of responding to fires on big, shiny fire engines, rescuing people from burning buildings. The truth is that while those things happen occasionally, the job for both career and volunteer personnel is more about the preparation for those events than the responding to them.
Firefighters have a responsibility to not just fight fires, but to take care of the tools, equipment, apparatus, and the stations. Whether the funding comes from the municipality or strictly by donation, we are stewards of those things the community has entrusted us with to do our job. We have a responsibility to take care of them like they were our own, or as I like to say, better than our own.
In volunteer departments, often there will be in addition to the duty days, assigned training sessions, apparatus and station sessions, and even fund raising. Between all these moments there is also a lot of bonding with the team, because since our lives are literally in our teammates’ hands, theirs are likewise in ours, and there must be a certain amount of trust developed, in that you know what you are doing and that you have each others’ backs.
If you like channeling your inner “MacGuyver,” the fire service is an ideal place to do so. We not only run to fires, but to any other type of emergency that the public needs to be taken care of. When people run out of options, they call the fire department. In the 30-plus years I have been doing this, I have wrangled out of control machines, fixed pipes, searched for a dolphin in a storm sewer (peope didn’t believe us when we said the noise coming from down there couldn’t be a dolphin and it wasn’t; it was a frog). My team has extricated a sea turtle from a swimming pool and rescued a goat that jumped off the side of a bridge. If there is a problem and nobody can quite figure out what to do, people just call the fire department.
The flip side is that you spend holidays and weekends away from your family, and if you have been up running calls all night, the next morning isn’t anything to celebrate. I have seen horrible, horrible things ranging from our response to Hurricane Katrina, to abused children and the elderly, to pillars of the community reduced to tears over the loss of their home from fire. I have been physically attacked, and just last night even, verbally attacked. You have to maintain the “neutral operating face,” not take it personally, and do the job.
I began my career as a volunteer in 1980 and remained a volunteer firefighter until 1993, while also being a career firefighter from 1982 until today. I can’t imagine doing anything else. But it isn’t for everybody; you have to put the team before yourself. Someone who is in it for the “bells and smells” won’t fit in well with a team that is built on “all for one and one for all.” But regardless of your choice, I wish you good luck.
