Pick this up and smash through that door.
Climb these stairs - which, by the way, are on fire - while wearing this 50-pound uniform.
Listen for a child calling for help while crawling through this tunnel, which, by the way, is filled with smoke.
And stand on that burning roof and cut a hole in it.
Those scenes come from a Madison Fire Department list of job conditions for firefighters. They warn you up front: "A firefighter must perform physically demanding work, requiring judgment, under adverse working conditions."
Today is "National Firefighter Stand Down" day in fire departments around the country, a call for attention by departments and the public that the people who look after the safety of others need to look after their own health and safety, too.
Departments large and small have been asked by the International Association of Fire Chiefs to focus today on firefighter safety. Since Jan. 1, 58 firefighters have died on duty in the United States. While the numbers have not significantly increased over the years, the IAFC reports, the number is alarming because it has remained about the same "despite monumental improvements in technology and equipment." Advertisement:
For full-time departments such as Madison's, the "stand down" means three days - to cover all shifts - of safety and health reminders above and beyond what has become an increased emphasis on healthy living.
"We push this for all our people," said Joe Conway, head of the Firefighters Local 311 "They don't get killed in fires. What they do is, within a short period of retiring, die of heart attacks from not exercising and smoking too much and things like that. We are trying to prevent that," he said.
A federal grant two years ago helped invigorate the Madison effort, Conway said, and there is an effort to get firefighters into the habit of working out daily from the day they start on the job.
For other departments today - such as in Verona, where there are three full-time firefighters and 35 volunteers - the call for attention will be noted, but action will be delayed.
"We don't have the staff to have special training (today), but we have discussed it with the chief and we will have a special training one night so it involves the whole department. We want to go through what causes firefighter deaths, with specific cases," said Assistant Fire Chief Melissa Helgesen.
"It's a wonderful idea," she added, noting that not only safety, but also firefighter health and physical fitness are stressed in Verona. "We have physical agility testing every year," she said, and firefighters are required to be able to run a mile and a half.
The National Fire Protection Association last month released an analysis of firefighter fatalities from 1995 to 2004 that showed heart disease as the main reason on-duty deaths have not decreased. In that 10- year period, 43 percent - 440 out of 1,006 - of those who died on the job experienced heart attacks or heart-related deaths. Of those, 134 had previously suffered a heart attack, undergone bypass surgery or angioplasty-stent placement.
The Madison department, which 30 years ago was among the first in the nation to focus attention and resources on keeping firefighters fit - paying for jogging shoes was a short-lived but contentious issue - has focused not only on safety and fitness but "behavioral health."
Conway said the firefighters have pushed for expanded health programs, including a "peer fitness trainer" program.
Assistant Madison Fire Chief Jim Keiken said firefighters here will be reminded that "this is a dangerous job, and our own safety statistics (as a profession) are not getting better. Firefighters get injured and killed and we don't need to have it happen here to learn those lessons."
Despite those dangers, firefighting remains a popular career choice.
At Madison Area Technical College's, there are waiting lists for the school's fire recruit academy and firefighter certification classes.