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© 2026 Firefighter Podcast
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The Firefighters Podcast is an award winning global podcast developing, inspiring, connecting, motivating & celebrating the world of our emergency services operators through a series of wide-ranging conversations with those within our emergency services family.
Hosted by serving operational UK firefighter & Instructor Pete Wakefield who speaks with individuals from all walks of life who share a connection with, can add value to, or can develop those within the fire sector.
Our driving purpose is to create a legacy resource for the current and future generations of firefighters & first responders
437 Episodes
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In this episode recorded live at the International Fire Instructors Workshop 2026 in Australia, you’ll hear from Edward Hartin as he explores fireground sensemaking and decision making for the station officer. Drawing on more than fifty years in the fire service and decades at chief officer level, Ed takes us inside the cognitive process that underpins command. How initial cues shape your frame of reference before you even arrive. Why experience alone is not expertise. And how deliberate prac...
London Fire Brigade protects one of the most complex urban environments on the planet. The resident population of London sits at around 9 million people, but that number is misleading. On a typical weekday, when commuters, tourists, and transient populations are added in, the number of people moving through the city regularly swells to 11 to 12 million, sometimes more during major events or peak travel periods. Around a quarter of all fire and rescue service calls in the UK come into London. ...
In this episode, I sit down with Scott Butler, a serving UK firefighter who has quietly built a life around choosing difficult things on purpose. Scott shares the pivotal moment in 2006 when joining the fire service forced him to grow fast, take responsibility, and stop making excuses. That turning point shaped not just his career, but his identity, and set him on a path where challenge became a way of understanding himself rather than something to avoid. Our conversation goes far beyond adve...
This short debrief episode examines the Bethnal Green Road fire of 20 July 2004, a commercial premises fire in East London that resulted in the deaths of two London firefighters, Billy Faust and Adam Meere. Crews attended what initially presented as a working shop fire and committed under Breathing Apparatus into a basement environment characterised by heavy textile fuel loading, restricted access, and limited ventilation. This episode focuses on exploring how fire behaviour can change when v...
I sit down with Chris Case, a firefighter who spent 25 years in Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service before making the leap to Canada and becoming Fire Chief of Chatham-Kent in Ontario. This is not a career-timeline conversation. It is a deep exploration of leadership, identity, and the personal cost of doing complex work in complex systems. We talk about moving beyond the cookie-cutter career, the curse of competence, and what happens when professionalism becomes a golden cage. Chris shares ha...
On this episode of we take a slow, deliberate look at the Old Albert Mill incident in Whitworth, Lancashire, from 15 May 2009. This is a structured incident debrief built directly from the original accident investigation report, with large sections read verbatim to preserve timings, context, and operational reality. The focus is not on blame or judgement, but on understanding how breathing apparatus operations, withdrawal under pressure, low visibility movement, and training culture intersect...
In this episode, I’m joined by Chris Kirby, Chief Fire Officer of South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and Chair of FireSport UK, to talk about why bringing sport back matters right now. We focus on the Festival of Fire Sport and how FireSport UK is using sport to reconnect firefighters through teamwork, competition, and shared experience, not just fitness for fitness’ sake. We explore how sport builds trust, resilience, and identity across the fire service, why earning your place alongsid...
This episode kicks off a new series of conversations exploring the British Firefighter Challenge Series, a nationwide circuit made up of thirteen events running from April through to September 2026. From stair runs and regional challenges to the crown jewel event at Moreton-in-Marsh and an international 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb in the United States, the series represents a growing movement within the UK fire service that brings together fitness, teamwork, community engagement, and profession...
On November 13, 2019, a career lieutenant died, and four other firefighters were injured while fighting a residential structure fire. What began as a seemingly routine night-time call rapidly escalated into a complex, high-risk incident involving crews operating above the fire, deteriorating conditions, wind-impacted fire behaviour, and critical information gaps. Early reports of life risk shaped decision making, while building construction, access limitations, and changing fire dynamics stea...
This episode is one of those conversations that quietly gets under your skin. I’m joined by Matt Akers, who currently serves in New Zealand, but whose journey through the fire service spans rural retained firefighting, aviation, London, and multiple countries. Matt’s lived and worked across very different systems, cultures, and tempos of the job, and that perspective runs all the way through this conversation. What we really dig into though isn’t tactics or titles. It’s life. The pressure to ...
In this episode, we take a deep, no-nonsense operational debrief of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, November 2018, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire of the modern era in the United States. We walk through the incident as it unfolded, the early warning signs, the rapid fire growth, the evacuation failures, and the brutal reality that most of the devastation occurred within the first four hours. This is not a dramatic retelling. It is a structured breakdown of how fire behaviou...
In this episode, Pete Wakefield is joined by Las Fallon to explore one of the most extraordinary and misunderstood fires in European fire service history: the Great Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875. This was not simply a large urban fire. It was an incident where tens of thousands of gallons of high-proof whiskey escaped bonded warehouses, flowed through the streets of Dublin, ignited, and turned parts of the city into rivers of fire. More people died from human behaviour and misunderstanding of r...
In this episode, we take a deep, minute-by-minute debrief of the Station nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island. A small ignition during a live music performance led to rapid smoke production, catastrophic loss of tenability, and the deaths of 100 people in less than six minutes. Drawing on investigation findings and eyewitness accounts, this episode focuses not on spectacle, but on how smoke, time, and human behaviour combined to turn a familiar venue into a fatal trap. This is not a s...
In this episode, I’m joined by Lucy Macleod for an honest conversation about identity, resilience, and what it really takes to sustain a long career in the fire service. We talk about being more than one thing, how busyness can become a coping mechanism, and why balance looks different for everyone. Drawing on Lucy’s experience across operational firefighting, trauma excellence, leadership, and academia, this conversation cuts past surface level wellbeing talk and gets into what actually help...
In part two, the conversation moves fully into the practical end of the fireground. Dave Payton and Iain Evans dig into search patterns, hose and branch techniques, and how different nozzle choices are used both in the UK and internationally. This episode challenges some deeply held habits, looking at where traditional search methods can introduce risk, how water application actually changes conditions, and why understanding flow and movement matters more than sticking rigidly to a single met...
This episode is essentially a long, mostly uninterrupted monologue charting the slow and graceful unraveling of my internal thought processes over the last twelve months. There is no guest. There is no structure anyone would recognise as sensible. Just me talking through what 2025 actually looked like, what the podcast quietly became, and the ideas, questions, and mild existential spirals that refused to leave me alone this year. If you’ve ever wondered what’s really behind the podcast, what ...
In part one of this two-part episode, I’m joined by Dave Payton and Ian Evans, co-founders of Fire Tactics and two of the most experienced fire behaviour and breathing apparatus instructors to have worked in the UK fire service. With decades of experience spanning West Midlands Fire Service, the Fire Service College, and national BA and fire behaviour training, this conversation cuts straight through doctrine, buzzwords and inherited habits to focus on what actually happens when theory meets ...
In this episode, Pete sits down with Dr Lynsey Mahmood, PhD, a behavioural scientist and applied psychologist whose work bridges academic research and real world fire and rescue operations. The conversation explores how psychology shows up on the fireground every day, whether we acknowledge it or not. From watch culture and social identity to leadership, behaviour change, and organisational blind spots, Lynsey explains why who we are, how we belong, and what we value shape the way we act unde...
Today’s conversation is with Bob Palestrant, a firefighter, emergency manager and author of Never on a 10, whose career spans more than four decades across nursing, paramedicine, frontline firefighting, urban search and rescue, aviation firefighting and homeland security. Bob spent over twenty years working in one of the busiest battalions in North America, deployed with Florida Task Force 1 including Ground Zero after 9/11, and later held senior leadership roles coordinating responses to avi...
This episode is being recorded from Lukla in Nepal, the gateway to Everest and the Khumbu Valley. A place where life happens at altitude, infrastructure is limited, and when something goes wrong the community cannot rely on fast backup arriving from down the road. Fire, rescue, and medical emergencies here are dealt with by local people, on foot, in extreme conditions, often hours away from definitive care. At the centre of that reality is Sonam, the local fire chief, and the community he ser...
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Brilliant podcast for anyone in (or looking to join) the emergency services. I've loved every episode and learnt a lot from both Pete and the guests - thanks so much for all the work you've put into producing it! 😁🙏