Firefighters Help Their Colleagues Deal With Stress Of Alberta Wildfire
MEDICINE HAT — There are small teams of Alberta firefighters travelling to Fort McMurray who aren’t on the front lines of the wildfire that’s been threatening the city, but are instead helping by listening to those who are.
Patrick Jerome, a Medicine Hat firefighter, is a member of his department’s Critical Incident Stress Management Team that recently travelled to Fort McMurray to assist crews deal with the mental effects of fighting such a large fire, which forced the evacuation of the city.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a known side-effect of emergency service work such as firefighting, and it’s something that teams like the one Jerome is on work to prevent.
“The fires that those guys fought is a lifetime of fires for a firefighter. It’s just so much firefighting that they’ve done in so little time,” said Jerome, speaking from Medicine Hat.