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How to be fires man: 1) Meet the qualifications for the department you're interested in. This varies by location, so you have to go to their websites and look it up. 2) Sign up on a government list. 3) Wait until your name is called on that list. Generally this is between 2-5 years. Sometimes there are different lists which get called in different priorities (for example, in NYC, if you're already part of FDNY but not a fireman, which means usually that you are working on one of their ambulances as an EMT, you get called ahead of genpop), which sometimes means the people on the good list get called in 1-2 years and the people on the bad list basically never get called. 4) Take a bullshit physical test. Sometimes instead of this you have to take a difficult physical test. 5) Enter the academy. This is mostly some dickhead pretending you're in the military so you shave your head as a sign of unit cohesion and run laps all day long and get yelled at. There might be a little school that will mostly involve "Listen to your lieutenant or else you will burn to death." Don't wash out. Congrats, you are a fireman. Now you get assigned to the worst station and can transfer to a different one in a few years maybe. If your region has EMT/Paramedics on its engines (mostly red states) you may be almost required to get that out of the way before you can join.* EMT is easy, you take a class that you can find by looking at the NREMT website which is about as much work as one college class and then apply for jobs -- your first jobs will be trucking healthy patients home rather than sick ones to the hospital and are mostly bullshit, after a few months of that you can start looking for actual 911 work which is the only experience anyone cares about further up the line. Medic is very difficult -- you have to be an EMT for six months on a 911 bus then pay about 10k for a one year long full time (like 8-5 four to five days a week) schooling program with a ton of additional time required on medic ambulances as a third. Once you're a medic if you've been working in the 911 system you may be able to upgrade with your current employer to a 911 medic bus. If you snuck into the program without 911 experience (happens a lot these days mostly because these medic programs are for-profit) then you'll start doing medic level tranports (your pts are hooked up to a vent or a cardiac monitor -- most of these calls are still bullshit). Neither job pays well and 911 jobs can be hard to get at either level in some regions. EMT work at the 911 level is mostly taking people who don't really need to go to the hospital to the hospital and occasionally doing CPR for medics on a basically unsaveable dead guy or once in a while a bad trauma (trauma is a basic level call because it's mostly getting them to a surgeon quickly that helps, not anything you can do in the field). Medics get to do less BS (though still a lot of it) and some really cool things including some procedures that only doctors really do in hospitals, and they get the privilege of being grossly underpaid for it. *Some regions will train you to be a medic once you're already a firefighter but that's mostly for legacy guys who got hired before that was required or who had connections to get them into the department. Don't count on this. Count on having to do it the hard way. raton fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 03:34
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MacMillan posted:I'm more than willing to study EMT/Paramedic, I just wouldn't want my full-time job being on an ambulance. I guess after reading up on all of the replies is to become a careerman. Other than prior military service (as well as previous fire/medic experience...) what could up my chances on the list? The list is the list, you get a number, you wait for your number to be called, they call them in order. You need to call your local FD to find out if they have a priority list or not if their website doesn't make it clear. Also there are probably shithole counties that do "merit based" applications which means 100% nepotism. Why wouldn't you want ambulance work to be your full time job exactly? You do understand that there are basically no fires any more and that firefighters basically function as EMTs/Paramedics in an oversized ambulance most of the time, right?
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Oct 1, 2015 16:40
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MacMillan posted:As I understand it (at least here in central Texas) 70% of calls are medical, 30% are fire related. Maybe I'll look into Wildland firefighting.. Of those 30% fire calls 85% are going to be a box smoldering in someone's driveway or some wheat burning next to a road that no one cares about. Firefigher is a legacy job that continually has to justify its existence because of the hilarious lack of fires these days. There are still enough fires that we need firefighters and we need to have enough of them around that it doesn't take them 40 minutes to get to a scene, but the truth is most of their time is spend in long j/o sessions in the firehouse and occasionally showing up to medical calls where an ambulance crew does the medical stuff and they watch so they can mark another call down on the log.
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Oct 7, 2015 00:58
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Oh and Wildland FF isn't really a career because there are no winter jobs doing it and the few that are are filled by guys who entered a city fire dept when they were 18 through nepotism and "retired" at 43 when they got their full pension and now gently caress around telling helicopters and trucks where to go on mountain during the summer and making phonecalls to politicians in the winter.
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Oct 10, 2015 01:11
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Larry Parrish posted:So you can tell this guy lives in Maine or Washington or something. There's a major forest/wild fire in response range of my home town's fire station every single summer, as well as dozens of smaller ones and the occasional structural fire, typically 1 a month. But everyone knows California burns down every year so whatever. I've also lived in NYC and I assure you the percentages hold for them, it's just that there are no driveways so instead they watch cars burn that someone threw a cigarette into or a tiny grease fire at the Chinese takeout joint. You actually probably do less real fires in an urban setting simply because so many more structures have commercial fire suppression in them.
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Oct 10, 2015 01:15
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