Euan Lawson was just 15 when he joined the local fire brigade with his black cork hat, and 50 years on he is still a volunteer firefighter with many hats worn over the decades.
Next week he receives his 50-years-of-service medal at a ceremony in Wakefield where he continues to be a volunteer firefighter and attends about 50 of its callouts each year.
It all began five decades ago, when a fatal house fire in Rai Valley prompted the community to establish its own fire brigade and Euan tagged along with his father to become foundation members.
Back then, it was simply a trailer pump and a Dennis fire truck which now lives at Founders Heritage Park. Twenty-three years later, the farmer and his wife Rose, moved to Culverden and Euan spent the next 18 years with its fire brigade, moving up to the role of chief fire officer. After mainly scrub fires in Rai Valley, Culverden’s fire brigade dealt with multiple high-speed crashes and, too often he says, fatalities.
He prefers to remember the successful callouts, like the Swedish girl who had to be cut out of her vehicle after it was T-boned by a truck. He visited her in hospital, knowing her mother was the only relative who could fly from the other side of the world to be by her side.
“I shook her hand and she wouldn’t let go. I’d talked to her all the way through cutting her out of her vehicle and I had her put her thumb up to tell us she was alright because she kept losing consciousness. We heard from her when she got back home and she had a full recovery.”
He was in Canterbury during the 2011 earthquake and the Culverden team initially spent 22 hours non-stop pumping water out of the bottom of the hospital while aftershocks continued.
“We went down two flights of stairs to the basement and I’m sure we were below the level of the Avon [River]. Water was pouring out of the cracks in the foundations.”
The Lawsons moved to Wakefield nine years ago and then to Pigeon Valley just two weeks before the Pigeon Valley fire.
Today he is a senior firefighter with Wakefield’s brigade, where he drives the truck and tries to look after the mental health of the team - a role he began in Culverden.
“In Culverden, young guys left because of the crashes, I started visiting the different guys on the trucks. It helps to talk about it.”
In 50 years, he says the equipment has come a long way and they don’t have to fundraise for the equipment now. Back in Rai Valley, he remembers the brigade fundraising to buy cutting gear for vehicle accidents and it was driven by a hand pump.
As a volunteer firefighter, he says callouts also impacted on Rose who was often left to milk the cows and once, on a rare occasion when she was shopping in Christchurch, she was called back to the farm to rake the hay so it could be baled before it rained. Despite Rose wondering when he is going to retire, Euan has no plans to do it any time soon.
“It gets me out of the house and I still enjoy doing it.”
