Ben Moore became a retained firefighter to help his community.
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The Dubbo local, like many emergency service personnel, is often on call, but relishes the chance to give back to his community.
He is also looking forward to showing off his skills this week at the State Firefighter Championships, and urged people to come to Ollie Robbins Oval and watch from Thursday.
“It’s just exciting,” Ben said. “The kids always love the firefighting, and just seeing what we do and how we do it.
“The other good thing about getting kids around these sort of things is, if they are in a house [fire] … they’re not as scared of a firefighter and they’re more likely to get rescued.”
Mr Moore has been a retained firefighter for five years, and began taking part in firefighting competitions with his Dubbo team about three years ago.
He relishes the challenge.
“I just enjoy the extra training, getting to do things that you wouldn’t normally do and helping out the public wherever we can,” he said.
“The suction event would probably be my favourite. It’s simulates if you haven’t got a water supply, you can pull up at a dam or river and … suck it out of the water source.
“It’s a pretty quick event, everyone’s got to do everything at exactly the right time or it all goes pear-shaped pretty quickly. We usually don’t go too bad in that one as long as no one stuffs up!”