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Depending on the requirements of a department, additional skills and certifications may also be acquired at this time. Firefighters work closely with other emergency response agencies such as the police and emergency medical service. A firefighter's role may overlap with both. Fire investigators or fire marshals investigate the cause of a fire.
The intermediate scale, the firefighter nurse (infirmier sapeur-pompier, ISP), is only a recent evolution and is performed by nurses who have been specially trained acting with emergency protocols; these nurses are the French equivalent of paramedics. The arrival of first responders is thus the most common result of an emergency call.
The first fire companies in Washington D.C. – the Union Fire Company, the Columbia Fire Company and the Anacostia Fire Company – were organized in 1804 to serve the White House, the Capitol and the neighborhood of Anacostia, respectively. By the 1840s and 1850s the differences between companies within the same city had become quite significant.
The primary responsibility of a probationary or rookie firefighter is to learn how to be a firefighter, and they are both mentored and closely inspected by other senior firefighters and the officers. Probationary firefighters can be full operating firefighters, responding to calls and entering buildings, as is the often case in paid departments.
Volunteer firefighters go through some or all of the same training that career personnel do, although the training varies among jurisdictions. When volunteers join a department, they often enroll in firefighting classes and other certifications that teach them how to become volunteer firefighters.
It was apparent that it would be impractical for firefighters to have to buy at least 10 manuals to meet the firefighter certification requirements. It was decided that a single manual should be developed to assist firefighters in achieving certification, and thus the Essentials of Fire Fighting was born.
A firefighter's SCBA usually hold 30 to 45 minutes of air, depending on the size of the tank and the rate of consumption during strenuous activities. While this gear helps to eliminate the risks, firefighters are still exposed to smoke, toxic dust, fumes and radiation that have contributed to firefighters being 14% more likely to develop cancer.
The Candidate Physical Ability Test (CPAT) is the standard assessment for measuring an individual's ability to handle the physical demands of being a firefighter.The CPAT is a timed test that measures how candidates handle eight separate physical tasks or functions, designed to mirror tasks that firefighters would have to do on the job.