Firefighters risk lives for little pay, respect

Irawaty Wardany ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Denpasar   |  Fri, 05/16/2008 12:48 PM  |  Bali

Firefighter may not be a profession for most people, considering its risks, but Putra and I Made Kartana love the job.

"I have been a firefighter for 13 years and I have never thought of changing jobs," Putra, a Denpasar firefighter told The Jakarta Post here Tuesday. He said that even though most people did not consider his job as a decent one, he was proud of the work.

"Even though people always consider us as a bunch of lazy guys who only work when there is a fire, it cannot extinguish the pride we have when we succeed in putting out a fire," he said. Especially when we know that we prevented the loss of life and minimized the damage, he said.

"That is always be our biggest source of happiness," Putra said.

He and Made Kartana then showed the Post the wounds they suffered when they fought a fire last week.

The fire claimed the lives of four people, who were trapped on the second floor of a burning shoe shop in Kertha Wijaya shopping complex at Jl. Diponegoro in Denpasar.are our wounds from the last fire in Diponegoro. Each wound we have from our work is like a priceless badge for us," they said.

Asked about their most unforgettable memories during their work as firefighters, they said the 2002 Bali bombing tragedy.

"At that time the whole city was blacked out and phone lines were cut. We were the first team that arrived at the bomb scene," they said.

At that time, they said, they were just groping around the scene to search for dead bodies and all they could find was pieces of bodies, legs, hands.

"I always consider people who work as firefighters as crazy, because they risk their lives for minimum pay and little respect from the community," A.A. Ngurah Gde Astawa, head of Denpasar Fire Department, said.

He said he always told his firefighters not to ask for rewards from people, but to ask for rewards from God in the next life.

"I ask them to consider their job as a deposit for the afterlife, so don't expect any rewards in this world," he said, adding it took full dedication to become a firefighter because there were no holidays and they had to be ready 24 hours a day.

"They have to be ready to be called to the scene anytime," he said.

"Currently we only have 69 personnel and 22 fire engines, which means one engine is staffed by only three personnel while the ideal figure is six for each engine," he said.

Not to mention water hydrants that usually aren't working.

"There may be only less than 30 percent of 247 water hydrants in the city that work," he said.

He said the biggest challenge in doing their job was the condition of streets in Denpasar, which were mostly too narrow for fire engines to navigate.

"However with such challenges in the field we are still doing our job with one basic principle, which is that it is prohibited to go home before we put out the fire" he said.

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