Five decades of firefighting for trio
When John Turkington first joined the fire service, you knew you had to get out of a burning building when your plastic helmet started to melt around your ears.
Fifty years later the gear has changed, but the comradeship that comes with being a firefighter has remained.
Turkington, as well as colleagues Lindsay Rowe and Paul Single, have now racked up 50 years of service with Fire and Emergency New Zealand.
All three men are still on the trucks and in the roster system, with no signs of slowing down.
As they sit around sharing stories of the old and new in the Hamilton Fire Station you can see their passion for the job, and why they stayed in the gig for 50 years.
Turkington, 69, joined the fire service in Plimmerton when he was 18 and at the end of a mechanic apprenticeship.
His father convinced him to finish the apprenticeship and two days after it was complete he joined the fire brigade full time.
In 2000 he made the move from Wellington to Hamilton, where he attended the Tamahere coolstore fire in 2008, which saw one firefighter die and several injured.
‘‘When I went down we didn’t realise how badly the other firefighters had been injured,’’ he recalls.
‘‘Then I found out one of them had died.’’
Turkington says he was getting ready to go to work when he saw smoke, so was in the car before the pager went off.
It was a long day, but as soon as he got home he went straight to Auckland to see one of the injured firefighters.
‘‘I needed to see him.’’
All these years later and Turkington says he still enjoys the job.
‘‘There’s not a lot of jobs around you can stay in for 50 years.
‘‘It’s something different every day, you don’t get bored.’’
He says while he was still
‘‘That was a sad fire . . . I didn’t realise how many people were involved and died.’’ Paul Single
‘‘There’s not a lot of jobs around you can stay in for 50 years . . . ’’ John Turkington
enjoying it and able to do it, he would be staying.
‘‘If I wake up one morning and decide I don’t want to do this, I can just go.’’
Single, 65, and Rowe, 65, have been working together for a number of years – firefighting is in their blood.
Both their fathers were firefighters and Rowe’s daughter is also a firefighter in Melbourne.
They joined at 15 years old before shifting to Hamilton, with Single joining in Napier and Rowe in Te Awamutu.
Single says the comradeship is still strong and always had been, which is part of what he loves about the job.
He had been to a number of calls over the years, but a standout was when he attended the Empire Hotel fire, which claimed six lives.
‘‘That was a sad fire . . . I didn’t realise how many people were involved and died.’’
After being in the service for 50 years he said he was starting to think about his final exit.
‘‘I would like to do some travel . . . so end of the year, early next year I will probably go.’’
For Rowe, an area that had changed dramatically since he joined 50 years ago is health and safety.
‘‘[The uniforms] are 100 per cent better than what they used to be.’’
Attitudes around safety have also improved.
‘‘If you were hesitant to go into the house fire [back in the day] they would push you in, because they thought you were slack. If you got hurt it was a badge of honour.’’
Two standout jobs he had attended over his career included the Valentines’ fire on Victoria St in Hamilton and the Empire Hotel fire.
‘‘I was second appliance at the Empire Hotel. That’s a fire where you just did what you could.
‘‘People were just jumping out of the building.
‘‘That was pretty traumatic that one.’’
Rowe says he’ll look to hang his hose up at the end of 2021, so he can travel.
‘‘[The uniforms] are 100 per cent better than what they used to be.’’ Lindsay Rowe