Yes. The City of San Marino employs only full-time, professional firefighters and, while you’re right about enjoying what we do, it’s probably not entirely for the reasons you may think.Driving “Code 3” (red lights and siren), for example, quickly goes from thrilling, to chilling. Nearly half of all firefighters who die on the job are killed in traffic collisions while responding to emergencies.
However, we do derive a deep personal satisfaction from making a “Good Stop” on a structure fire, or from saving someone from a heart attack. This is not even the most emotionally satisfying part of the job. Few people will ever get to know personal satisfaction of having a person who we last saw en route to an emergency room in critical condition stop by the fire station to thank us for our part in saving their life. Something like that can keep a person grinning for weeks.
Virtually every study of “emotional rewards” of various professions, if the study includes firefighting, reports our job as number one. Few firefighters are surprised at this. However, this is a demanding job, actually more a lifestyle with strange hours, unique challenges and a “bottom line” that is, literally, Life and Death. On the downside, recent studies have shown that firefighters are prime candidates for Critical Incident Stress Syndrome, the psychological damage and behavioral changes associated with exposure to strong emotional situations where the sufferer feels powerless to intervene, or cannot integrate the sometimes horrible reality of an incident into his conscious mind.