Varied life of a firefighter

THIS weekend there is an open event for aspiring firefighters at Huddersfield Fire Station, with a further event at Dewsbury Fire Station next weekend.

To see how varied the role is, I joined the Water Rescue team at Rastrick Fire Station and the Technical Rescue team at Cleckheaton Fire Station to learn more about the rescue side of the job.

Crew manager Tony Rostron, of White Watch at Rastrick, and his colleague Shaun Gibson demonstrated their water rescue skills with Chris McCabe, the crew commander from Birkenshaw who was willing to dive into the cold water for them to practice pulling people out.

“We train once a month, it’s important to keep practising and honing our skills for when we need them,” he said.

I too volunteered to dive in to be rescued. I shouted and waved for help. The teams can deploy their boats quickly and with a top speed of 22mph they reached me in no time.

The 2015 Boxing Day flooding brought WYFRS’s water rescue efforts to the public’s attention, and more recently they’ve been involved in rescuing a person from the canal in Brighouse.

CM Rostron said: “We rescue people stuck in water; we have a boat for wide area flooding. We had a lot over a year ago and this boat was used to rescue people out of houses and people who were in distress. We do rescue people out of fast-flowing and swift water and we have been called to animals in distress and we’ll get them out too.”

The team at Cleckheaton demonstrated some aerial skills in abseiling, something out of my comfort zone, so I watched firmly from the ground.

They were simulating the rescue of a casualty who had fallen off a viaduct onto scaffolding below.

They set up a two-line system, and sent firefighter Nick Ward over the top to abseil down. He assessed the medical need then moved the casualty (a dummy) onto a stretcher for it to be sent to the ground.

Watch Commander Darren Haley, of Cleckheaton’s White Watch technical rescue team, said: “The types of jobs we use this rescue technique with is people who have fallen down quarries or hills; people in work scenarios and sometimes animals trapped where the only way we can access them safely is with ropes.”

Like the water team, they do a day’s training every month and go out into the community so the training is realistic.

It can’t always be realistic though – WYFRS has a life-size rubber horse to practice animal rescues.

WC Haley said: “We go to as many incidents of other natures as we do fires so we have to train for every possible scenario, whether it’s road traffic collisions, rope rescues, animal rescues or chemical incidents, plus the prevention side because if we can prevent a fire or rescue incident happening the better for it.”

So is the job of a firefighter at WYFRS for you?