Inside Douglas Fire Station's recruitment event

Transcript

00:00 Ladies night.

00:02 The search and prevention is done for Batman.

00:04 You're currently recruiting, so what sort of physical assessments have to be passed for someone to become a firefighter?

00:15 What we do is, amongst other things, we do a bleed test, which is level 8-8,

00:22 immediately followed by a hose running test, where we run at 6 lengths of hose, 25m hose, in 8 minutes.

00:31 So we have to run it out, roll it up, and then run it out again.

00:34 So it's like a shuttle run, but running out the hose.

00:37 It can be hard to visualise that in my video demonstration, if you want to see it.

00:41 The bleed test is the one that I'd say puts people off quite a bit, and that is just from that trauma back in school.

00:49 It's not that bad, it's done in here, pull all the trucks out, it's just shuttle runs back and forth.

00:55 You said you struggled with it at first?

00:57 I'd never ran more than 2 miles before I joined, not into running, do lots of other things.

01:03 I didn't particularly train for it, I just ran.

01:09 The one thing I found is, do shuttle runs, because the change of direction caught me off.

01:13 I found on every one I was trying to catch up with everyone else, I changed direction,

01:17 but I just pushed through. It's not a massive level to achieve, and I think a lot of people will surprise themselves.

01:22 Come and try it now, it's coming up again soon, the 6th and the 8th of Feb.

01:26 And yeah, just give it a go.

01:29 Those come try it sessions, can you outline exactly what they're being done for?

01:35 It just kind of gives it a bit of an insight, so I think there is the bleed test.

01:40 Again, we've got it set up here, and we'll have the bleed, so it's easier to do than going to try and set it up on your own.

01:46 We have the BA crawl over a small tunnel, so people may notice what looks like scuba gear on our back,

01:53 it's what we wear for going into house fires and other irrespirable atmospheres.

01:58 You have to crawl through a series of tunnels when you do the actual recruitment.

02:01 On the come and try it day, we have a section of around 7ft of tunnel just to try and get through.

02:06 It's a bit of a confidence test, I suppose, with confined spaces, because confined spaces are something we do.

02:13 As well as that, there is the hose run, which happens.

02:17 Again, there's a bit of technique with that, and it's just a very different thing from what you're going to do in a gym.

02:22 It's what it says on the thing, really, come down.

02:25 So with the come try it sessions, are they also talking about the skills of what you actually need to do once you're out in the field?

02:31 Is a firefighter a job based on fitness and that sort of thing?

02:34 There's lots of times you can have that conversation.

02:38 It's hard to say what skills you need as a firefighter, because you could be going out to anything.

02:44 The best team is made up of wildly different people from different backgrounds.

02:49 Whether that's from office backgrounds, lots of trades, across all of the trades,

02:56 they've all come in really handy, depending on what we end up going to.

03:00 That's how you make the best team, is having the maximum width of that knowledge and experience.