A Day in the Life of a Firefighter in California’s Capital.
“Helmets melt, skin blisters, and joints ache 48 hours at a time”
Working only ten days a month sounds pretty great on the surface, but many people don’t fully appreciate what this “dream schedule” entails. Those “work days” are twenty-four hours of straight work, which averages to 56 hours of work a week. Also, the shifts come in 48-hour blocks, which mean the firefighters are on duty and typically awake for 48 hours straight.
Burning the Midnight Oil
Most of the firefighters in Sacramento work two days on an ambulance and two days on a fire engine or truck. The ambulance work is brutal and usually consists of 15–20 calls each 24-hour period. When you consider that each response takes approximately one hour to treat and transport the patient, you start to appreciate how little time that these firefighters have to eat or sleep. The work on the ambulance is brutal enough to convince most firefighters in Sacramento to either seek employment with another fire department or promote internally after about seven years. This is complicated by the tendency for burnout to set in after about two years on the job.
Turn and Burn
The time firefighters spend on the fire engine or truck is certainly a different experience, but also one that is not much easier. Currently, Sacramento City is on track to experience over 800 structure fires in the district this year. For a fire department with only 23 fire stations, 800 fires means that each firefighter will fight more than their fair share of fires. And the challenges of a structure fire are both exciting and exhausting.
Picture yourself crawling on your hands and knees with 40lb of gear while dragging a fire hose. This tends to push firefighters to their physical limit. Helmets melt, skin blisters, and joints ache 48 hours at a time. We tend to talk about the excitement and accomplishments, but the reality is most fires are hard, high risk, physical labor.
All Risk
The title “Fire” Department is honestly misleading, since “Fire” only consists of about 10% of our daily dispatches.
The title “All Risk” Department, a.k.a. “The things no one else wants to do” Department, would be a better fit. From playing rogue chemists while containing hazardous material spills, to ad-hoc lifeguards in swift-water rescues, firefighters face an unimaginable array of challenges.
Functioning outside of our comfort-zone is the norm.
As a result, both the learning curve and additional training never ends. No firefighter is a master of their domain since the domain is in constant flux.
Culture
Despite the workload, it’s the culture that keeps the proverbial machine working.
There is nothing like adversity to bring a group of people together.
We are one team aligned by a common goal of saving lives (and often times simply surviving the shift). It is this focus on our mission that keeps us functioning like a fine-tuned machine. When the alarms sound, all grievances and disputes are dropped, and our collective focus turns to answering the call. Firefighters typically enter their career as young, idealistic men and women and leave as old, seasoned realists.
That is if they are savvy, and lucky enough to make through a day in the life.
Eric Saylors is a third generation firefighter with twenty years in the fire service.
To Read More from Homeland inSecurity:
