The City of Cape Town’s fire and rescue service welcomed young and old to their fire stations on Thursday 4 May to celebrate International Firefighter’s Day.
Mayco member for safety and security JP Smith joined firefighters at the Goodwood fire station where the men and women in uniform went through their paces.
Llewellyn de Lange, senior firefighter at Goodwood fire station, said with International Firefighters’ Day, they were selected as one of the stations to show the public what fire fighting is all about.
“We got some of our top-quality vehicles in terms of technical rescue, and our newly purchased equipment and we decided that we are gonna do a briefing on fire safety, what Firefighters’ Day is all about. We have set up outside for the community what it gets down to. All the broad spectrum of things. People think we only put water on the fire, but we have a wide variety of skills with technical rescue. We have robe work, and people getting stuck at heights. We got our vehicle XD which does vehicle extraction. We go to car accidents, so we thought okay, let us do a very compackt package and quickly in a nutshell show the public what we are all about and that they can also go home tonight and spread the word and awareness as well,” De Lange explained.
According to him “at the end of the day it is what the members of the public do at home that make our jobs so much simpler”.
In memory of lost and fallen
According to Warren Sam, station commander at Goodwood Fire Station, International Firefighter’s Day is all in memory of our lost and fallen firefighters and to honour the firefighters today still putting their lives at risk for the safety of our members and the community. But in Australia, firefighters died in the line of duty during a wildland fire. Since that time they started International Firefighter’s Day, first to commemorate them and then to honour everybody else who is still doing this, and those who have retired.
“We decided instead of saying what we are about we also want to educate people about the life experience. For example one of the areas where we educated the people about the number to dial. We told them to take out their cellphone and type this number. This number is direct to your local fire station. It skips all those long call centres. The other day we went to a school to do some education. Two nights later we went to that community. We were there in two minutes because the people dialled the number. They even recognised us. They told us we are so glad you told us to take out our phones and to put in the number because we got you here in three minutes,” Sam said.
Sam says the want to teach the basics as a human being.
“You are always sitting in a restaurant, people can start choking, CPR, people that collapse. We show you the basics of choking from an infant, to a child, to an adult as well as CPR and when people go away here they say wow, we learned a lot today. So, it is not to show off what we do but to teach people.”
