Maxime Gervais-Lafetière: Life at the Fire Hall

Here, read the transcript of the interview with Maxime Gervais-Lafetière, a firefighter in the Saint-Eustache Fire Safety Department.

***

In both my professional and personal life, I keep up with my outdoor training and watch what I eat. I’m careful because I’ve realized that when there’s an incident to respond to, it’s important to be physically fit. And an incident can happen at the most inconvenient time. You can get up on any day, any time of day, you may have to respond. A call can come in the middle of the night, at 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., 1:00 a.m., and you have to be 100% on your game. And you’ve got to be rational, you’ve got to be able to think straight. And it’s hard to pull that all together when your health isn’t perfect. That’s why physical fitness… At 2:00 a.m. we had a fire in a six-storey building. We had to go up six flights of stairs with 100 pounds on our backs, with the hoses. When I got to the top, I realized that physical fitness was incredibly important. Because once you get to the top, you have tasks to perform. You’ve got a fire to fight. And if you find a victim, you’ve got to be able to get them out, you’ve got to be fit enough to give them first aid and get them out.