Focus turned on Foxton Beach firefighters
Brookieis
Across Foxton, volunteers from every walk of life are helping the community in almost every way you can think of. In this occasional series of photo articles, Foxton’s MAVtech Museum photographer Jacob using vintage cameras from the museum’s collection to show a day in the life of our town’s volunteers.
No matter what the time of day, the sound of the fire station siren means help is on the way. Volunteer firefighters attend far more than just fires — they also respond to urgent medical calls, vehicle accidents, calls to help ambulance crews, search and rescue, creating landing zones for rescue helicopters, securing roofs lifting in a storm, managing flooding — to name just a few. They also help neighbouring brigades when extra support is needed.
The volunteers never know what the next callout will be — the only way to be prepared is to practise everything. So, every Monday at 7.30pm, the Foxton Beach Volunteer Fire
Brigade hosts a training session, and MAVtech’s cameras recorded a recent one.
The Foxton Beach brigade
currently has 15 volunteers who drop what they’re doing at any moment to turn out to emergency incidents — either at the beach or as far as Foxton,
Himatangi, Shannon.
Waita¯rere and Its three new recruits, Emma, Alana and Katrina, are
preparing for their recruits’ course at Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s national training centre in Rotorua next year. This challenging course involves being sent into a controlled-structure fire wearing breathing apparatus — an amazing experience and one of the final tests before a recruit qualifies.
But no matter how long a volunteer has been serving, it is always important to practise the basics. The training session pictured here is a hose drill, with crews running out hoses and other volunteers at the fire engine’s pump controls. On a fireground, there will also be scene protection and crews getting into breathing apparatus ready to approach the fire. With teams inside and outside of a structure fire needing to co-ordinate, radio communication is practised as well.