COLUMN: Spend a day in the life of a firefighter

In this column I’d like to make quite clear that this is, simply, not true.

The role of a firefighter really is so much more diverse than people think. Of course fighting fires is a big part of our work, but we now attend a much bigger range of incidents – including road traffic collisions, flooding, animal rescues, water rescues and more – and we spend a great deal of our time out and about in the community trying to prevent fires happening in the first place.

It is for this reason that we have held a number of ‘firefighter awareness days’ recently that have given people an opportunity to come and see this for themselves.

Some of these events have been for women only, some have been mixed and some are yet to come.

They involve members of the public, who may have never thought about a career in the fire and rescue service, coming on to a fire station to speak to our staff, learn more about what life as a firefighter is like and have a go at our job related tests – such as the ladder climb, confined space and equipment carry tests.

Interested? Good, because you’re invited!

Seeing people come in and learn more about the service, and ultimately start to see their future lying with us, has been fantastic – but we’ve still got more events to come and we want to see as many people there as possible.

If, therefore, you are interested in attending one of these awareness events, send me an email via [email protected].

The two events we’ve got coming up first are both taking place at our service development centre, which is based at the Dukeries Complex in Ollerton.

The first one is a mixed event on Saturday September 30, and the second is a women-only event on Sunday October 1.

It would be great to see as many people there as possible and if you’re not interested yourself, it would be great if you could help us spread the word.