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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
431 Episodes
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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...
This episode goes deep into the reality of fire behaviour as it actually shows up on the fireground, not the simplified version many of us were taught early on. Matt and I talk about how modern fuels, building design and ventilation have changed the speed and violence of fire development, why smoke is often the biggest killer in the room, and how firefighters still get caught out by flow paths, rapid fire development and unseen pyrolysis. We get into high rise and complex buildings, wildfire ...
This conversation with Alan House pulls us back to the foundations of who we are as firefighters. Alan started his career in the 1960s, rose through Hampshire Fire and Rescue, and has spent decades preserving the story of our service. As part of the Firefighters Memorial Trust, he helps record and honour every person who has died in the line of duty. His work reminds us that remembrance is not nostalgia. It is accountability. The story of the British Fire Service stretches from the old insura...
Inside the Lancashire Tactical Firefighting Summit: A Four-Part Series on Modern Firefighting. The final episode brings the series home with Greater Manchester’s Tactical Firefighting Training Lead Dave Berry. Dave is one of the founding voices behind Tactical Firefighting UK. Dave charts the UK’s slow march toward modernization, from years of near-identical training practices across multiple services to the moment everything began to shift: when a small WhatsApp group of instructors decided ...
Inside the Lancashire Tactical Firefighting Summit: A Four-Part Series on Modern Firefighting. In episode three, Fire and Rescue New South Wales instructor Lucas Garden takes us deep into the evolution of modern fire behaviour training. He traces how his service moved from rigid, tradition-heavy British-style tactics toward a more scientific, evidence-based approach shaped by international research. Lucas explains why understanding energy is the key to understanding fire, and how misconceptio...
Inside the Lancashire Tactical Firefighting Summit: A Four-Part Series on Modern Firefighting. In episode two, Station Officer Gerard Mann of Fire Rescue Victoria builds on Dan’s analysis by shifting the focus to how a fire service thinks strategically, tactically and culturally. Drawing on sixteen years across operations, training and doctrine development, Gerard lays out a simple but powerful framework that connects strategy, tactics, tasks and techniques. He explains why leadership alone c...
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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! 😁🙏