ETHICS AND WORK IN EMERGENCIES 213take heroism in a trained and properly equipped firefighter to attemptmore
than his training and equipment prepared him for. Presumably, even the risky
work of fighting an average fire is open, through training, to an ordinary
human without exercising superhuman efforts. Otherwise it would make no
sense to recruit firefighters from the general public. And so even though this
work is dangerous, it is wrong to associate it with heroism. Heroism comes
into its own with an emergency on a large scale. Thus, many of the firemen
who attempted to rescue people in the Twin Towers on September 11 were
heroes, because of the mammoth demands made on the fire service by that
event, and by the willingness of fire crews to rise to the occasion; but not every
call-out, even for a moderately big fire, is necessarily an occasion for an effort
that stretches people enough to make heroes out of them. Even a major fire
may be manageable work for every member of several crews working at once.
Disasters, on the other hand, by definition overwhelm the available personnel.
It is probable that there are aspects of the firefighter’s job that are traumatic
and therefore highly demanding even when they donotput any firefighter’s
life at risk. For example, 4 per cent of the UK fire service’s time is spent on road
traffic accidents, and this work, as well as rescue from collapsed buildings and
major weather incidents, can be very harrowing. Viewing and handling badly
mutilated bodies, and especially the bodies of children, is particularly stressful.
It is singled out as the single most stressful part of the job by Australian
firefighters (Moran and Colless 1995: 410). Again, in a study of DPS, ‘a public-
sector provider of pre-hospital emergency care’ in Australia, Boyle and Healey
found considerable psychological disturbance arising from exposure to death,
and also in balancing emotional reactions to the extreme circumstances of
road accidents and normal life away from work, or periods of inactivity at
work (Boyle and Healy 2003: 357). Like the UK fire service, DPS has an
overwhelmingly male workforce, organized along strict hierarchical, quasi-
military lines, and this sometimes seemed to pose an obstacle to emotional
balancing. Further, even more routine, aspects of the job can also make it
stressful. There is the shift system, with its impact on sleep patterns and the
continuity of family life. There is the strict, military-style hierarchy, with its
inflexibilities and lack of channels for ordinary criticism and accountability.
Then, because of severe gender and racial imbalances in some emergency
services, notably the fire service in the UK, there are problems of sexual
harassment and racism (Bain 2002: §3.41. The ILO discussion document, op.
cit. pp. 30ffsamples imbalances internationally). When these are combined
with the life-risking aspects of the job, even if they are not everyday aspects,
they make a difficult job harder, especially for women and members of racial
and ethnic minorities.
It does not follow from the fact that the job is difficult that the FBU’s strike
action was justified. Even if the pay for the job was inadequate—a claim the
Bain Report implies is debatable—the general disruption and potential threat