Fire Ops 101: In which a psychologist discovers he is not, in fact, a firefighter

There is a particular moment in life when you realise you have made a series of decisions that cannot be undone. Mine arrived at approximately 10.40am on a cold morning at the Fire Rescue Victoria Training Academy in Craigieburn, wearing roughly twenty kilos of turnout gear, a breathing apparatus set strapped to my back, and an expression that I am told was visible even through the face mask.

The building in front of me was on fire. Properly on fire. Not metaphorically on fire, in the way I usually describe a Year 9 boy’s bedroom. Actual flames. And a very calm young firefighter besides me said the words that will stay with me for some time: “Right, Michael. In you go.”

What on earth is Fire Ops 101?

For the uninitiated, Fire Ops 101 is an invitation-only programme run by Fire Rescue Victoria in partnership with the United Firefighters Union. It takes politicians, senior public servants, business leaders and assorted community stakeholders and, on this occasion, one adolescent psychologist who should probably have read the brochure more carefully and puts them through a day of realistic simulated firefighting operations.

The idea is beautifully simple. You can read a briefing paper about response times, staffing levels and equipment budgets and nod sagely. Or you can be handed a hose line and asked to advance on a live fire while your own breathing roars in your ears, and then have someone mention response times. Funnily enough, the second version sticks.

The day is structured as a series of scenarios, each with a qualified firefighter buddy (LFF Kelly) always attached to you, partly to teach you and partly, I suspect, to stop you from doing something spectacularly foolish. You respond to a structure fire. You tackle a blaze at a simulated major-hazards facility. You attend a train carriage fire where members of the public have been overcome by smoke, providing emergency medical response before searching for a missing person using a thermal-imaging camera. You assist heavy rescue technicians cutting a trapped person out of a mangled car. And you drill through concrete with a machine so heavy it has to be dangled in front of you on a hoist, a luxury fire fighter often don’t get – but then you get to watch the professional go into action with the sort of unhurried competence that makes you feel deeply ordinary.

The official pre-arrival advice is to eat a good breakfast, drink plenty of water and turn up in comfortable clothes. I would add three further recommendations: manage your expectations, abandon your dignity at the gate, and do not under any circumstances, assume that being reasonably fit for your age means anything at all in this context.

Things I learned, some of them about myself

Firefighting is a full-body cardiovascular event. I have spent forty years telling adolescents that exercise is good for their mental health. I now understand that I have been describing a completely different activity to the one FRV does for a living. Dragging a charged hose line is not a workout. It is a negotiation with physics that physics wins.

Breathing apparatus is a psychological experiment disguised as equipment. Within thirty seconds of donning a BA set, your world contracts to the sound of your own respiration and a rapidly diminishing air supply reading. It is, I can report professionally, an outstanding demonstration of what happens to cognitive bandwidth under load. You become extremely stupid, extremely quickly. Which is precisely why firefighters train so relentlessly, so that when the thinking brain goes offline, the trained brain keeps working.

Heat behaves in ways your instincts do not predict. In the live-fire compartment, watching flame roll across a ceiling above you, every part of your evolutionary wiring is screaming at you to leave. The crews besides you are calmly reading fire behaviour the way I read a family genogram.

Nobody does anything alone. Not a single task all day was completed by an individual. Every scenario was a crew operating as a single organism, with communication so economical it was almost telepathic. As someone who bangs on about connection and belonging for a living, watching genuine team cohesion under pressure was worth the entire day on its own.

What I took away

I came for a novelty experience and left with something considerably more sobering. These are people whose ordinary working week involves entering environments that every human instinct tells them to flee, attending road crashes and medical emergencies, and carrying home images the rest of us are protected from. Do that for twenty-five years and it accumulates. The occupational trauma literature on first responders is not ambiguous, and after one day at Craigieburn it is very difficult to read it the same way again. Whatever these people are being paid, it is not enough. Remember that next time you vote for a party that is refusing to pay these people what they are worth.

I also came away with an uncomfortably clear appreciation of what “resources, training and response times” mean when translated out of budget language and into the physical world. Ninety seconds is an abstraction on a spreadsheet. Standing in that gear, in that heat, ninety seconds is an eternity.

So, my sincere thanks to 3aw's David Mann, who invited me to go on this adventure; Kat Dunell, Acting Station Officer and Fire Ops 101 Coordinator; Ed Starinskas RTO Chief Executive, Fire Rescue Victoria and my amazing buddy Leading Fire Fighter Megan Kelly who not only was brilliant and reassuring and encouraging me but also took some photos. I shall never forget the crews at the FRV Training Academy for their patience, their expertise and their admirable restraint in not laughing audibly.

I remain a psychologist. But I now understand, in my legs, my lungs and my slightly singed sense of self-importance, exactly what we are asking of the people who run towards the thing everybody else is running away from. You are my heroes. Thank you for your service.

Ten out of ten. Would sweat profusely again.

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg AO, MAPS