Well said! My family have required the assistance of the fire department when a car was set on fire outside our house. As well as responding quickly, they came inside and checked our house was safe, updated the fire alarms we had and basically made sure we were ok. How anyone can fault the fire service is ridiculous.

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well they are overpaid for the amount of work they actually do and as for hero’s they are not they do a job that they are trained to do just like any-other job so come on firefighters stop moaning.

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I as other readers are i believe well aware of what Mr johnsons issues are with the fire service I believe it all boils down to value for money etc etc .
Of course it is very tragic when two firemen are killed however they were doing the job they chose and were paid for and as such were well aware of the risks?. These two mens deeds were heroic and selfless and as such that should be the main talking point here.
However many members of the public from all walks of life have little respect for any one doing a job other than the one they do what ever that job may be .
A case in question was when i questioned the words HEROIC and WAR ZONE being used by a teacher to describe the people in the teaching profession. I said the words in the literal sense would never apply to a teacher in the classroom and suggested they speak to a soldier or a soldier’s widow.
Their reply was a soldier knows the pay and conditions and risks when they apply for the job. A perfect example of some sections not respecting other’s jobs. Every member has the right to question the value for money of people who are paid by them the tax payer.
However some elderly people and some in certain professions believe this as an excuse for poor manners and lack of respect for others.

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suellen, does it really matter what Monkey’s , mine or your profession is, we still have a right to an opinion.

We have to face up to it, that although firefighting has a risk element to it, it is over glamourised and no where near as risky as many mundane jobs which you can find listed if you search hard enough. How often do we read of construction workers, hgv drivers, fishermen etc losing their lives in other parts of the country but it does happen far more frequently than firefighters lose their lives so live with it.

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Suellan Fowler, I am an ex soldier whos as been to war and saved lives BUT I do NOT see MYSELF as a hero or did not moan like fire persnel do today its a job.

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I welcome the comments of the Chief Fire Officer, and thought that he had been more than patient. It seems to me that that newspapers will publish letters that contain unbalanced opinions, and then cry ‘it wasn’t our fault’ as an excuse. If you look at Shropshire Fire’s website, you will see a mixture of letters containing boh positive and negative views. The opinion become more biased when you factor in the ammount of time P Johnson has written. So why give him a forum if it’s the same old diatribe over and over again.

Personally I respect everyone’s right to have an opinion, but I feel that if you are going to express it in such a forum, it would be better to have all of the facts before making comments, this in my opinion demonstrates ignorance.

So lets be clear on the facts. P Johnson says that firefighters are lazy, and they don’t do enough work for the money they recieve. Each day firefighters must complete a routine that is heavy on workload, and are required to multi-task or respond to calls at a moments notice. They do work with the community, school visits, assess risks, drills and practices and study for qualifications. They are provided with beds at night, because they are required to work 14/15 hour shifts, and so must be allowed the oportunity to rest. After all, you wouldn’t want a tired firefighter if it was your home/business ablaze, would you?

With regard to the non-uniformed complaint that is so often raised, these people are required to support the service, remember that the fire service is run by operational personnel, and must be maintain even when they are out on calls. No one in the service does anything other than enable the firefighters to get into the engines and respond to calls. This is significant when you take into account recent technologies being introduced into every fire service, of which Shropshire Fire has led the way, these system would not work if they didn’t have the support staff to maintain them.

Then there are givernment targets whihc must be met, and support staff perform vital roles in monitoring and performance analysis to ensure that this work is carried out.

The final point is with regard to the officers. P Johnson rather cynically points out that there are larger command structure than there used to be and officers get paid when they are on call, which is true. It is also true that the officers in question are almost never off duty, and even when not responding to fire calls, they must be avaialble and working. If it were any other kind of job, I think most people would expect some recompense for that kind of commitment.

Perhaps some people think that the Chief Fire Officer mentioned those deaths as a way of garnering favour, but I feel it is more likely that he was saying that the letter publish simply felt insensitive. They may have been from a different service, but it doesn’t mean that every firefighter doesn’t feel their loss most profoundly, and coutns their lucky stars it wasn’t them.

Maybe they’re not heros, and if you asked a firefighter they’d probably agree, and the same goes for those sitting in control every day and night while we sleep knowing that help is only a 999 call away.

Just rememebr that it is these people that will come and help you no matter what, and for that they deserve our respect, gratitude and decent pay.

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Cloin D, did you even read the statistics I gave you, let alone understand them. They are accidents per 1000,000 worker-years

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/020/Labour%202005/Most%20Dangerous%20jobs.pdf

It lists the most dangerous jobs and takes into account the number of workers over so many years and guess what? I doesn’t even list firefighters .

Get real man.

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Colin D, as for ignorance being bliss , ignoring statistical evidence and insulting another writer’s pen name, says it all about yourself.

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Firefighters choose to do a job that is potentially very dangerous. That does not make them heroes per se but it does deserve respect. That they get to sleep sometimes in between calls is fine by me. I would rather a well rested man turned out to my house fire than an exhausted one.
I went into a house fire once many years ago during the firemans strike in about 1980 in Liverpool. The bottom two fkllors were ablaze and someone had to be reascued from the third floor. I managed it but I am not ashamed to say that I found the experience terrifying and could not believe the heat and smoke generated. I vowed then that I would never want to be a firemen or have to get involved in a rescue from fire again. On another occasion I pulled someone from the river severn intent on syuicide. The fireservice were there, lighting the area, lending strong hands and arms to assist and ready to use the equipment they carry. Firemen do a good job that they are trained for. When things go wrong and they die they are called heroes. When everything goes well they are criticised. Firemen deserve the respect for what they do and the likes of monkey and Johnson are way off base. I have great respect for the “water squirters” and applaud the fact that the chief fire iofficer has spoken out on the nonsense that the original writer puts out. Value for money is a great talking point until it is your house on fire, your relatyives at risk or your property being destroyed. Suddenly money is no object.

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hear hear

they do a good job and for a reasonable price

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I think P Johnson needs to get real, perhaps he is a delinquent with no or very little education and nothing else better to do then run down professionals who risk their lives every day for others. Does not matter if they are paid or not (there are a lot of reserve firefighters out there who are not), they are brave individuals who provide a valuable and needed, public service to the public so that we can sleep in our beds at night.

Perhaps this Hyprocite who feels the need to write in so often, needs to spend a day in and around a Fire applicance instead of being a teapot and “spouting” out rubbish on a weekly basis.

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Monkey,

Fair enough although I still think you’re out of order to criticise since no-one runs round claiming anyone in the forces in over paid (quite the opposite in fact)

Road runner, if you can’t think of anything more constuctive to say than to suggest I’m a nympho who fancies the uniform you can just jog right along (or run as your name suggests)

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Roadrunner, you give the statistics you quote a simplistic interpretation.

They are as much a barometer of negligence, usually as a result of the ‘efficiencies’ that you would no doubt prescribe for the fire service and poor practice.

We should applaud the Fire and Rescue Service for protecting their members with rigorous standards of safety and training their recruits to a high standard of professionalism.

Why spew so much bile and resentment at men and women who dedicate their working lives to protecting us and coming to our aid in our most harrowing moments.

You crow on about ‘value for money’ as though you were single handedly financing the Fire Service yourself!

There’s far too much bitterness and resentment from people who develop the perception that firefighters, or other groups of workers, are getting a better deal than themselves, rather than looking at the big picture.

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Suellan, whatever next?

In the space of a few days you’ve gone from calling me a coward to labelling any woman who fancies a man in uniform as a “nymphomaniac”.

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I’m sorry that you sem to think that I have a resentment against, firefighters, women or the world in general, maybe. Far from it, I have many women and firefighter friends so don’t know where you get that idea from.

In the real world none of the firefighters I know go around considering themselves as heroes and non of the real men I know consider firefighters heros, that I’m aware of….maybe your real world and mine are worlds apart?

Your arguments about relative risk are both unrealistic and childish, I can only quote official figures but if you want to believe otherwise, that is fine by me. We all believe what we want to believe , whether it is reality or inside our own mind. I prefer reality, myself.

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Worker in solidarity would be a strange pen name for someone who thinks that firefighters should be held in higher esteem than other workers, but that is not my position.

My motivation for contributing to this thread was to express my support for the comments of the Cheif Fire Officer and disdain for those of the now infamous ‘P Johnston’.

Monkey’s contributions state ‘they are overpaid for the amount of work they do, they are not heros…come on firefighters stop moaning’ and ‘ I do not moan like firefighters do’.

I vehemently oppose the views held by monkey as they are utterly without foundation or basis in fact.

Should I not express my distaste for these comments out of deference to an ex member of the Armed Forces? Who’s putting people on a pedestal now, roadrunner?

Where is Monkey’s evidence of firefighers moaning, or expecting hero worship?

I, too, dislike hero worship; we are all capable of honourable deeds but we are all, too, fallible.

But that does not mean people should not praise firefighters or express their appreciation for the difficult and dangerous job they do.

I find it odd that praise of firefighters perturbs you so much. How the Fire Service is portrayed by the media or ‘women’ is beyond their control.

Tickets for Heroes, Football for Heroes, Help for Heroes…All organisations devoted to the Armed Forces. No such organisations exist for firefighters, so why single them out?

Re: relative risk, you comment example earlier in the thread that ‘probably the biggest risk we all face is driving TO work more so than actually doing the job in the main’.

But such a risk can be mitigated to a large degree by good driving practice. Firefighters are duty-bound to respond to incidents that are inherently far more dangerous than the daily commnute to work and for which the risk cannot be minimised in the same way.

You misunderstand me on ‘negligence’, I am not blaming the workers in the industries that suffer higher fatalities. It is often the employer who compromises safety on the grounds of efficency and that is my point – firefighters safety should not be sacrificed on the altar of ‘efficiency’. And neither should those of any other worker.

If you are friends with firefighters then you will know many of them believe safety is being compromised to appease those who lobby for ‘value for money’.

If a risk assessment was done on the job of Fishermen and Firefighters, I wonder who would be assessed as facing the riskiest job?

I am sure that some of the situations firefighers are expected to deal with are riskier than those a fisherman is but maybe fishermen are exposed to a lower risk but more frequently?

Statistics require interpretation and scrutiny.

I do not agree with your opinion that real heroes are people who ‘do something at a moments notice’. In these situations people are acting on instinct. When people join the Fire Service, they are making an honourable, sober decision to serve their community in a way which may require the sacrifice of their own lives.

My last point is that we cannot judge the value of someone’s work solely on risk or likelyhood of fatality. Millions of people do very worthwhile work which involves a very low risk of personal injury or fatality.

I hope I’ve answered your questions roadrunner, and made my position clear.

Perhaps you could tell me whether you oppose the blatherings of P Johnston, or why the ‘hero worship’ you perceive firefighters receive from ‘the media’ and ‘women’ bothers you so much?

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You have a disturbance involving alcohol fuelled morons outside your house, or you have an intruder on your property. You ring the police – they arrive an hour or two later (if at all). Good value for money?
I have been burgled four times and have to say that the police let me down.

CSO’s riding around on mountain bikes on nice sunny days, or Three police cars, four police motorcycles and 7 police officers on foot carrying out random vehicle checks on the main road – While the police helicopter hovers overhead looking for a shoplifter that has run off into the woods..good value for money?

I CAN guarantee if you dial 999 and request the fire service they WILL arrive within a set target time and will be prepared for what ever faces them.
My knowledge of the fire service isn’t of the management but of the highly trained, dedicated, professional men and women on the frontline.

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