((PKG)) FIREFIGHTER
((Banner: The Firefighter))
((Reporter/Camera: Cristina Caicedo Smit))
((Map: Germantown Maryland))
((Carla Hidalgo-Gato, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue))
Hi, I’m Carla Hidalgo-Gato with Montgomery County Fire and Rescue and I’m a firefighter here. Come on in.
We run everything from a broken toe to a building on fire. This is the watch office where our calls come in and we do all of our reporting.
Hi, it’s Carla at 22. How are you?
About 85 percent of the calls that we run are EMS (Emergency Medical Service) calls, which is medical and the other 15 percent or so are fire calls.
This is our training room and conference room. We have our lineup board which is all of the riding positions and what equipment we’re all responsible for.
This is our kitchen and dining room. We generally cook together as a shift, and especially for dinner. We have dinner together.
We all sleep in the same room. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve slept in open bunkrooms. Almost every firehouse in Montgomery County has an open bunkroom. All the people I’ve ever worked with, it’s been a very pleasant experience.
As a firefighter, I knew that it would be harder as a woman just because it was a man’s world. I think that men come into this line of work and they’re given a certain amount of respect and expectations, and as a woman I feel like maybe we need to earn that. But, I have found that once I had it, it wasn’t so easy to lose it.
My mom thought I had lost my mind. She thought I was crazy. There’s never been a firefighter in our family, much less a woman firefighter.
So, this is the Nomex hood that we put on to protect our head. We keep our boots already inside of our pants so that we can put our pants and boots on quickly. Coat, it’s several layers. And last but not least, my helmet. That’s it.
I enjoy driving all of the equipment. It’s probably the funnest thing there is to do on the planet. They do a lot of recruiting of females and it just doesn’t always work out. I think it’s a misconception. Maybe they’re not sure exactly what we do. Maybe it’s just not a career path that any woman in their family has ever taken. They don’t perhaps know any women firefighters. You know, it could be any number of things.
((Carla Hidalgo-Gato, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue))
I think we have so much to contribute. I think we enhance and enrich the department and the job that’s being done. We bring a different perspective. We approach situations from a completely different angle. Anytime you’ve got six people in a room, just having a different perspective could make a difference in the outcome of the situation.
((Banner: The US has more than a quarter million firefighters. Less than 4 percent are women))
