KEY POINTS:
The oldest was 59, the youngest just 16. There was a former Royal Marine, a builder, an engineer, a filmmaker, a retired nurse, a farmer. That's how I saw them as they cut into the chocolate cake that a couple of grateful Girl Scouts had brought along at the end of their training on Tuesday night.
But that's not how you might see the 18 people who make up the Clevedon Volunteer Fire Brigade. You might see them at your worst moment.
A moment like Clara Ng experienced when her family's car smashed head on into a four-wheel drive vehicle and Grant, a maintenance engineer in his other life, had to make sure the young woman didn't look back at the mangled bodies of her loved ones, dead in the back seat, as they cut her out of the wreckage.
Someone said they looked like wax dolls with the colour drained away. There are always remnants of images that need to be dealt with later. When a crash is that bad, they tend to call each other afterward, just to check in. They each handle it in a different way.
Owen, a builder and 21-year veteran of the force, finds it better not to talk about it. But sometimes, like for this crash, he woke up at 3am and thought about the woman who survived. "Did we do everything we could? You ask yourself over again".
He wasn't the only one. Sometimes their words were identical. Did I do my best? Did I make the right call? They ask themselves.
The answer always has to be yes. It's how they sleep at night with the worst part of the job.
My friend James, a filmmaker, writes the Fire Brigade News for the Clevedon Round-Up. He wrote this later that day.
"I'm a different person today. When I woke up this morning I was probably the same as you, planning my Easter weekend, until my pager went off.
"I've been in the Clevedon Volunteer Fire Brigade for seven years and have attended more car accidents than I can count, but the times when I've had to cut an injured person out of a car, or cover another with a sheet - have changed me.
"It hits you on your way home from the station or when you go to bed at night. You don't have time to think about it when you're working frantically to extract someone from a wreck.
"Your adrenalin is pumping. You do what you've been trained to do. And we do it well, but far too often.
"We sent four off in ambulances today, including a young woman with multiple injuries whose husband, parents and sister didn't fare as well. They were taken by the coroners. One of us said: 'There but for the grace of God go I'." Today roughly 80 per cent of New Zealand's firefighting crews are volunteers. They don't make one gold coin from this work. When you leave Christchurch, the next paid crew you'll hit is in Nelson. When you leave Wellington, you don't strike a paid crew until Palmerston North. No one is paid north of Whangarei. Even Queenstown is all-volunteer, according to John Thorn of the United Fire Brigade Association.
If one of New Zealand's 1700 paid firefighters is exposed to bodily fluids or gets a gradual process injury, such as shoulder problems from hauling hoses for a decade, he's covered by ACC legislation. But if he is one of our 10,500 volunteers, it's tough luck.
Coral has four kids and 50 acres: "From the moment we put on that suit, even the locals think we get paid." Places like New Brighton, north of Christchurch, may get 500 call-outs a year.
For Clevedon's 60-80 annual calls, their pager may go off three times in a single night and yet Brett, a fencing contractor, still has to get up at 6am for his day job. When doing four-day special trainings away from home, they lose pay from their regular jobs, and then train weekly another 48 times a year.
On weekends the Clevedon crew fund raise for their wish list. They want a defibrillator. They hope to buy a water tank truck someday so they don't have to find a stream or drain someone's pool.
They joined to "look after their own". They joined for the fantastic people. They joined because, as Owen told me quietly, "When you save somebody, it gives you a lift for a month. There's no better buzz."
And we just assume that 365 days a year a vicar, an electrician and a sales manager will jump up from their anniversary dinner, or putting the baby to bed, to run out the door to help us out of our worst moment.
Sometimes thank you isn't enough.
