The Life of a Heroic Firefighter

I was awoken by the piercing noise of my alarm. I thought it would be an ordinary day on call at the fire station. However, it wasn’t an ordinary day. I ended up fighting the largest fire in my profession and there were catastrophic fire alerts for most of New South Wales. However, let me start from how I got to where I am today…It all started when I turned ten years old. My mum asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I quickly replied with “ I wanna be a firefighter just like dad was before he passed away.”

I am now 14 and although I have found other interests, I still have the same dream. Whenever I tell people I want to be a firefighter just like my dad was they start laughing at me because they don’t believe I will make it. But I am determined to make my dream come true and prove all these people wrong. This year I have decided to enrol as a cadet firefighter so that I can gain some experience before I’m older so that it is easier for me to join the bushfire firefighting crew. It has now been 4 years and I am transferring to the bushfire firefighting crew. Tomorrow is my first day and I am a little nervous but also excited to start a new adventure.

I wake up to the sound of my alarm. I quickly sit up and turn it off. I got up and ready to go to the fire station. On my way to the fire station I was listening to the radio. They said that someone had lit a tree on fire and it is spreading quickly. I knew that there was a high chance I would be attending this fire once I had reached the fire station. Once I arrived at the station the alarm went off and we got a call saying we needed to get to the fire as quick as possible. My crew and I rushed to get our stuff on and then jumped in the truck and drove off. On the way we were having a team briefing so that everyone knew exactly what we were doing. When we arrived…

The fire was already covering at least 200 hectares of bushland. We quickly jumped out of the truck and got straight into setting up and fighting the fire. Due to the bad weather conditions it was a long and tough battle that lasted 17 hours of hard continuous work. Once the fire was out we went back to the station and went home.

A week later we had another small incident that only took us 3 hours to put out due to good weather conditions.

Now that brings me back to where I started. I woke up to the sound of my piercing alarm I switched it off and got up and ready for another day of work. I knew the fires would be bad because we were in a very bad drought, it was windy and it was a 42 degree day. We had already alerted everyone that there would catastrophic fire conditions a week ago so that people could evacuate or get their belongings ready incase they needed to evacuate. When we arrived at the scene of the fire it was a lot larger than we had originally anticipated. We quickly set up and began to fight the fire.

While we were attempting to put out the fire with the help of the aerial firefighters, I realised it was getting closer to the houses. I let our team know and we moved one team over near the houses to help prevent them from catching on fire. They aerial team covered the nearby houses in pink fire retardant. We were constantly fighting for 14 hours with little improvements on the size of the fire on one side but it was still spreading rapidly due to the strong winds. We finally got a rest and received a bottle of water. Whilst on my break…

I saw two koalas attempting to escape from the blaze. I put my drink down and rushed over to them and picked them up. I then sat down and grabbed my water bottle to slowly pour water into their mouth so that they weren’t dehydrated. I then called a wildlife rescue centre to come and collect them so they could have a health check up and return to the bushland. 

Cite this page