What does it mean to be a volunteer firefighter?
Good evening everyone,
As in the western part of Romania, but also in other areas, temperatures have recently exceeded the normal limits for this period of the calendar, undesirable events have begun to occur, either the vegetation fires I am writing about today, or those of some houses.
I thought long and hard about whether to make a post about the fact that I am part of the emergency volunteer team in our community, or not to make a post about it.
What does it mean to be a volunteer firefighter?
First of all it gives you that extraordinary feeling that you could save someone or something from a tragedy, it gives you that feeling that you could be useful exactly when someone needs you.
I have participated in many interventions in which the damage was significant, some people lost their homes, and unfortunately I have also participated in fires in which people lost their lives in the flames, honestly about these moments I will not write or publish anything because they have an unbearable emotional charge, the fact that you want to save someone and actually making all human efforts you can not do anything.
How does such an action go?
How does the information get to us?
How quickly are we ready for action?
I will start first to tell you how information reaches us, how we find out that someone is in danger or how we find out about events.
In every country there is a single emergency number, so here in our country people can call it free of charge and report different situations, so in cases where fires or other emergencies are reported in our area of action, the single emergency number calls us and informs us of the situation, now comes the most interesting part, namely to answer your third question.
In total we are ten volunteers in this commune, a not too big commune of about 4100 inhabitants, some of them are also at work so we find them harder, but there are others who can be called 24/24.
The fire engine is always full of water and foam, has all the equipment of a fire engine, and the group of volunteers usually doesn't last more than 5-7 minutes after the alarm is given, because most of them work together and when I call one of them they all leave at once.
We are not professional firefighters, but we go first to the event, being in direct contact with the single emergency service we analyze the situation and if we see that we can not cope we call the professional firefighters within our county.
There are unfortunately quite a few such events when we act together with professional firefighters due to the complexity of the situation.
To answer your first question (I seem to have answered questions differently than I wrote them) about how such an action goes, after we get the call from the single emergency service, we have one person who leads the whole operation, one person who guides the volunteers, that is, he coordinates everyone, from the driver of the truck to the person who turns on the hoses, the success of the action depends on him, let's not forget that he is the person who is in constant contact with the emergency service and he, together with those at the centre, decides whether the fire brigade from the county will intervene.
Instead, today I will share with you the action I took part in to put out a vegetation fire that was endangering traffic on the national road, a very important road linking Romania to all of Europe.
The call was given by the drivers of the cars passing on the national road, immediately the emergency services called us and in about 15-18 minutes we were already there (the headquarters where the fire truck is kept was 2 km from the fire site), from the first investigations it was considered that there is no need for the intervention of the county and that the situation can be kept under control and liquidated.
After about an hour the fire was extinguished, there was no significant material damage and no other events, the fire was manifested on an area of about 8500sqm.
Dear visitors and readers of my posts I thank you again today for stopping by, I hope that today's post will encourage you to become a volunteer not necessarily in emergency situations, you can be a volunteer in many situations, until next time I say goodbye.
Yours @triplug!