StraightAhead

Firemen get a lot of time off, or it seems so. This is mainly because when they are at work they work 24 hour shifts. There are all kinds of combinations of these 24 hour shifts. When I was on the large fire dept. in Tennessee that I belonged to for 7 years we worked 24 on, 24 off, 24 on , 24 off, 24 on and then four days off. Where I am now we work 48 on and four days off. We used to work 24 on and 48 off. It all works out to about the same amount of hours in a work week. I average about 53 now. It won’t average 53 hours exactly so every month they end up paying us 4 hours of overtime, which is a good thing. Firemen have a lot of time away from the station because when we are there we are there for a long time. I work about 10 days a month, but that is 240 hours at the work place which means at any time you can go from complete boredom to all out physical and sometimes very exciting labor. It can be very dangerous or not, most of the time it’s not. I love the work schedule and have been working this way for 32 years or so on two different fire departments. One other thing is vacation time. I get 15 shifts a year off because I have been on the department a long time. The new hires top out at 10 I believe. So if I take two 24 hour shifts off then I can be away from the work place/fire station for 10 days. 4 days off on either side of the 2 work days. 4 vacation days gives me 16 away from the job and so on. I guarantee I need the time off to spin down from an over abundance of medical calls. Calls come in spurts too which is another Fire Dept. phenomenon. You might have a 2 day shift that is very quiet with nothing much going on other than your station work which really doesn’t take to long to do, but another 2 day shift may be very different with a lot of calls of all kinds. It’s just the way it goes. I work a lot of 3 and 4 day shifts because of the small number of career firemen on our department. There are three guys that work at each station one at a time doing their 2 days. If one of us three take vacation or sick time off then the other two work one of his two days, thus a three day shift for each of the other two guys. The extra days are overtime though. Good thing. I’ve worked a few 4 day shifts and a couple 8 day shifts during hurricanes, when we are all called in for the duration.