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My name is Peter Brzezicki. I am a professional firefighter.
Firefighting involves fighting fires and preventing fires from starting,
but what most people don’t know is that the majority of our calls are rescue calls.
Our department does technical rescues. These involve special equipment.
These can be high angle rescues—pulling people off the cliffs or from crevices or deep river canyons—
or water rescue, which is divided into surface rescue, ice rescue and dive rescue.
The dive rescue is the most technical aspect of it. It involves search under water and pulling subjects from under water.
Our job is actually everything about people. We might think of firefighters as fighting fires in structures,
but really it is not the structures, there are people behind those places. Those are people’s homes, property, workplaces.
We have a lot of interaction with people. In fact everything we do is around somebody’s emotions, somebody’s problems.
The feeling of satisfaction if the job went well is absolutely the best thing we can take home.
The minimum requirement to become a firefighter is a high school diploma. A good majority of firefighters start as volunteers, in different levels.
Volunteering is important because after a few experiences, a person will know if this is for them or not.
This job has elements of everything—mechanics, physics, chemistry, interaction with people, first-aid, medical aspect.
There’s not just one particular thing which you have to be good at. You almost have to be good at everything to be really a good firefighter.
I moved to Canada twenty-two years ago, and I came from Poland. I was a firefighter in Poland, and I also worked for mountain rescue in Poland for quite a few years.
We never run into situations that are identical. There’s always something different, even in a very simple call there’s always something different.
And very often what works in one case isn’t going to work in another case. You have to find different ways to resolve problems.
This job is for people who really do care, not only about others, but about everything.
For example, you can’t walk around the station and see something not right on a piece of equipment and say, “That’s not my job.�€?
It is our job. At some point of time, that part of equipment is going to affect the outcome of what we are doing.
The second thing is you have to be in relatively good physical shape to do that job. You have to be quite mentally strong for this job—quite stable—and the rest will come.
One average, we might say that income is going to oscillate somewhere between thirty thousand dollars a year to sixty thousand dollars a year, on average.
Keep in mind, that in a lot of small places—rural places—the fire departments are volunteer departments, which means the firefighters are not being paid.
They will have the information on volunteer aspect,
but for a full-time job you have to travel to the places where the full-time fire departments exist.
I could be really proud to tell others that my job is firefighting.