Orange City Life had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Fire & Rescue NSW Station Officer, Matthew Jeffery, about the ins and outs of his profession.

How did you end up working as a firefighter?

I was always headed down the path of a uniformed service, I was thinking about going into the Ambulance service actually back in the day.

I was in the Army Reserve for four years when I had met a permanent firefighter and started to become exposed to that world.

As well, I knew two other guys who were permanent firies, one through TAFE and another socially, which through them sparked my interest further within the profession and I joined in 1996.

What does your typical working day look like?

We start shift at eight o'clock in the morning. I'll come in and check my emails, liaising with my manager who's in Bathurst. After that, I'll generally use the gym for about 45 minutes and grab something to eat.

And then we head out mid-morning, usually grab a coffee and combine that with one of our training sessions. So it's a nice day, we'll find a nice area to do it. The moment I've got a new guy on shift, so we're just going through a rescue gear. And of course, if there's an emergency call that comes in that takes priority and we head out to the scene.

I like doing all the core pre-incident plans, for instance, I've been focusing on buildings of significant historical and cultural value around Orange that if there was a fire, we could be losing a piece of local history. So we go to those locations and we collect information on where power, gas and water supplies are situated, identify any unusual hazards, and then we come back to the station and log the information into the computer.

And the information then gets uploaded to our mobile data terminals in our trucks. So every truck in the state potentially could rock up to Orange, with the pre-incident information accessible to use on scene.

It’s a very diverse job, you don’t know what you’re going to get each day, you'll have a quiet period and then you will have some pretty chaotic callouts.

What do you love most about your job?

The variety of the profession, you get to work with interesting people, and you meet interesting people. There’s a sense of achievement with helping the community and the people of Orange.

It’s rewarding working with multiple agencies, Police to Paramedics, especially when you’re responding to an incident, whether a serious car crash or out of control fire. It can be the worst day in someone’s life, so when you’re working together with other agencies to create the best outcome for that person or people caught in a dangerous situation and have them leave in a better position is very rewarding to know you were able to help them.

But I enjoy the community engagement. Kids generally wave at the trucks when we’re out and about, both young boys and girls are always quite interested. We talk to interest groups around town and it's just good to be part of the local community.

What’s your favourite place to go to in Orange?

I do enjoy a good surf turf meal from many spots around town in the CBD. I enjoy living in the Central West overall. I've got three kids, so we enjoy getting out camping, hiking Mount Canobolas, and doing all those sorts of things in the region.