Becoming a Firefighter

Everyone seems to enjoy the inside information from the fire department. So here is a brief series about what the fire department in Florida is like. Of course details vary by department, and we aren’t like departments up north, where the department pays your way through the academy. (unless you are a minority or a woman- see below)

Licensure

Firefighting is a pretty popular career. To become a firefighter in Florida, the law says you have to be licensed by the state. There are two ways to do that-

• Go through the fire academy, which takes from 4-6 months (depending on how many hours you go per week). When I went, we trained three nights per week for 4 hours each, and 8 hours on Saturday. It took 6 months. About 80% of those who began my class went on to pass the licensing exam.
• Or, if you can prove you were a certified firefighter from another state, you could challenge the exam. Most who do this don’t pass, mostly because they don’t understand the little things the examiners are looking for.

That licensing exam is a beast. First, a written test, followed by a practical exam. The practical exam is things like knot tying, hazardous materials awareness, and the “big three.” There are many small places where you can lose points, and missing more than a few of them means you fail. Passing says you have passed “minimum standards” to work as a firefighter in Florida. The journey is just beginning.

Once you complete that hurdle, you have to become either an EMT-Basic, or a Paramedic. It isnt’ required by law, but I don’t know of a single fire department that hires firefighters who aren’t also certified in one of these. EMT takes 1-3 months, and Paramedic takes 6 months to a year, depending on how many hours per week your school holds class. Then of course, there is the obligatory licensing exam.

There are a few departments who will hire EMTs and Medics without fire certifications, but they can’t fight fire, and get A LOT less money. Some other departments will hire paramedics and then put them through the fire academy, medic school is more demanding than the fire academy.

Many applicants will work for an ambulance company somewhere while waiting to be hired. The pay is not very good (Taco Bell pays more than EMTs make driving an ambulance), and spending too long at one of these companies (more than 2 years or so) gets you labeled as unhirable. Departments just assume there is something wrong with you.

Hiring Process

So now you are a certified firefighter. How do you get a job? You look for fire departments that are hiring. Some departments are better than others. Each has different pay and benefit structures. Some are better at their jobs or better equipped than others. You really should research a department before you apply.

Some departments have additional requirements. Some require that you be certified as a HAZMAT Technician, some hire paramedics only, some require that you be a certified Emergency Vehicle Operator. It varies by department. Generally, the more certs a department requires, the more it pays, the better it is to work there, and the more competitive the hiring process.

Some departments don’t get enough qualified minority applicants, so they will hire a limited number of uncertified people. The competition is fierce for these spots. One department I know of got applicants from all over the USA for these spots. If selected, those departments pay you to attend the schools to get your certification. Some departments play it shady to increase minority applications for those programs- one even ran the ads for it only in Spanish and only in the Spanish only newspapers in the area.

When my old department would have an opening, we would get about 200 applications for each open position. Departments like Boca Raton and Orlando have very high starting pay and great benefits. As a result, they get the pick of the best, and will get up to a thousand applicants for each open position. There had to be a way to filter out the lazy and stupid. There are numerous ways to do that.

We had a written exam, as most departments do. Of those who took the exam, the top 25% were invited to return for the practical exam. The practical exam can be as simple as a combat challenge, or a more complex one. Here is the combat challenge, which looks easy, but certainly is not:

You have to finish that in less than 8 minutes to even be considered, many can’t finish at all. My best time is 3 minutes and 42 seconds, and that is a good time. The stuff you see them using in that video is full weight firefighting equipment. These guys in the video are some of the fastest in the world at that drill. In fact, the world record is 1:14.76, so the guy in that video is only about 3 seconds from a world record.

• That firefighting gear is heavy and hot. It’s like exercising while wearing a 40 pound sleeping bag.
• Those rolled up hoses at the beginning on the stairs? the one he carries is about 70 pounds. The roll he hoists with a rope is about 50 pounds. Those gloves are slick, and they make that hoist a challenge
• Your feet have to touch every step on the way down.
• That metal beam on the sled that he’s hitting and driving with a sledge? It weighs 150 pounds
• That charged hose he’s dragging weighs about 170 pounds with the water in it
• The dummy he’s carrying weighs about 200 pounds.

These exercises are designed to wear you down, upper and lower body, as well as cardio. It’s difficult. As I said, many people can’t do it. When I did my personal best of 3:42, I almost passed out at the end. I had to have people help me get my gear off because my arms refused to work and I was seeing stars, which before that point I thought was a myth.

Some departments have you crawl through mazes in the dark, with the mazes being very nearly to small to fit through. Other departments have medical scenarios. The end result is the same- the department generates a hiring list that narrows down those hundreds of applicants to a ranked list of perhaps 20 or 30 recruits, and the department hires from that list. The people who tend to be at the top of one department’s list tend to be at the top of everyone’s list, so most departments only consider their lists valid for six months before retesting to generate another list.

When an applicant is offered the job, they are background tested. Those requirements vary. All will exclude people with felonies. Some departments will exclude anyone with a misdemeanor, or require waivers. My department was no criminal convictions ever, and no traffic tickets in the past 36 months.

When I was hired, I tested for three different fire departments:

• In the first, I was #7 on the selectee list. They hired numbers 1-5, number 14, and number 19. Why did they skip? Number 14 was a paramedic, and number 19 was a woman. There are very, very few women firefighters. Quotas, don’t you know.
• The second one, I don’t know why I didn’t get it.
• I was hired by the third department- there were two of us hired that year. It was the first time in 2 years they had hired anyone, and the other firefighter hired with me was a woman.

Yeah, being a woman, a minority, or a paramedic makes it much easier to get hired. If you can manage to be all three, you can pretty much have your choice of any department you want. White EMTs without experience? Your odds are about 1 in 400 of getting hired by the time you consider schooling and the hiring process. Some don’t make it through training, and many people go through the licensure process and never get hired before their firefighting license expires. They will never get hired. Like sperm, they die off before ever becoming what they could have been.

Hired

From there, you are hired as a probationary firefighter. There is a training program for most departments, then you make it on to a crew. Once you report to the crew, there is still more training before you can operate on your own, and before you can get off probation. Your crew and the training officers decide if you make it all the way through your probation. That’s a future post.