From house fires to false alarms - and even freeing a toddler’s trapped fingers from a shower grate - 18-year-old Jack Fitzgerald has become a fully-fledged volunteer firefighter.
He’s part of the next generation at the Richmond Volunteer Fire Brigade, where he spent eight months as a recruit before heading to Christchurch for training and earning his firefighter status.
Being a firefighter has been his dream since he was a kid, and he says signing up as a volunteer is one of the best decisions he has made - starting from the very first callout to a house fire.
“Hopping on the truck was sick – that was my introduction and I was like, wow. It’s like the movies! Since then, it’s been false alarms and rubbish fires.”
One job that stands out was crawling under a house to help free the fingers of a distressed toddler who had somehow managed to trap them in the shower grate. To free her, Jack had to cut through the waste system to remove the grate with the toddler’s fingers still stuck, before someone could carefully cut it away.
“I went under the house and went – oh! - and was guided through what to cut. In those intense situations, you have to have urgency, but it’s best to take a step back and think about what you do, before you do it.”
His chief Craig Piner is full of praise for his youngest volunteer, who is already being tested in stressful situations.
“They learn how to handle stressful, dynamic situations, so you have someone there to calmly deal with it. The community benefits from that as well.”
Jack has also been involved in the brigade’s education work, including the escape challenge where members of the public get to see what it is like finding an escape route in the dark with artificial smoke.
“People go through and come out the same entrance – they just get disorientated.”
For that reason, Craig says households should have two escape routes and practise them as a family in case of fire.
The brigade attended 330 callouts last year and has 33 volunteer firefighters signed up so that each turns up to about 40 per cent of incidents.
