CAPPING WOMEN’s AND FIRE PREVENTION MONTH

City Fire station hosts Bohol’s

1st Women Fire Olympics ‘26

TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol, (PIA)—Tagbilaran City Fire Station (TCFS) hosts this year’s and Bohol’s first Women Fire Olympics, highlighting the expanding critical roles of women in firefighting and emergency rescue services.

Six all-women teams from all three congressional districts of Bohol, converge at the PMI grounds on this sweltering day, in colorful hooded team uniforms, to showcase women power the way they knew it: fire-fighting while striving to even up the skills with the males.

Tagbilaran City Fire Marshal Fire Superintendent Angelie S. Salva, who has hardly warmed her seat as the new city fire chief emphasizes: fire safety and fire protection is for everyone, it knows no age, it knows no gender, thus the move to highlight women power.

Aside from March as Fire Prevention Month, it is also Women’s Month, Salva, who assumed as city fire chief March 10, said.

Leading now an office with 14 of the 40 active personnel excluding those who are schooling, Salva thought aiming for more agency collaboration is her priority, and getting the women from their outposts n the different areas in Bohol could bring the message across.

“Every agency has a specific stakeholder, we wish to be that bridge that connects fire safety to their mandates, that fire safety can become part of their mandates too” she added.

And with the women who are their ambassadors now, the future could be bright.

And like their male counterparts, the event opened the arena for bringing out the best women power in a profession largely dominated by men.

An rare chance for women to assert their unbounded capacities, the women fire olympics, also wants to assure the public that women firefighters are equally capable and can do, what many think is a task only for the boys and men.

They would be competing in four events, TCFS operations officer Senior Fire Officer Mariamric Gasque explained, where women teams from the districts prove they too can do it.

Competition events include rescue and transfer event where female firefighters have to carry a rolled fire hose for 15 meters, take a victim through lovers carry, and the team finally carries a presumed injured victim strapped on a spine board, into the safe zone.

The second event which each team has to complete in the shortest time and without any technical deduction is Personal Protective Equipment donning (fire coat), slinging of self-contained breathing apparatus, and a critical firefighting skill in fire hose throwing.

The third event is an actual fire fighting simulation where a team has to attach a fire hose into a fire truck, roll three hoses, connect these together to a fire nozzle where two firefighters in fire coats aim the hose to a fire target.

Still another competency to be tested is the replacement of a simulated busted hose.

All over, amidst the sweltering heat, women hauled rolled fire hoses, hugged a sack of sand for the lover’s carry, and unrolled the visibly heavy fire hose in one swell swoop. (PIABohol)

GIRLS ON FIRE. Women fire fighters from all three districts of Bohol converge here at the PMI grounds composed 6 teams and competed against each other in the skills which were previously dominated by men. Like the fire men, these ladies showed grit in fire fighting skills, like rescue and carry, fire coat donning and fire hose rolling as well as the simulated fire suppression, including a busted hose replacement. (PIABohol)