Fire safety education: 16+
For my girlfriend
With college students, our main educational focus is on encouraging safer driving.
1,219 young people aged between 17 and 25 were killed or injured on the county's roads in 2006.
It is a grim task for firefighters to cut free injured casualties from the wreckage of a crash or, even more distressing, to cut free bodies of those who have not survived.
We team up with the council road safety teams to deliver a hard hitting demonstration to groups of students at colleges across the county.
The For My Girlfriend campaign is usually carried out in the run up to Valentine's Day to encourage young male drivers to drive safely and responsibly, as statistics show that more young teenage girls are killed as passengers in road traffic collisions than drivers, and usually when their boyfriends or male friends are driving.
With the help of make-up artists, a volunteer teenage boy and girl are made up to look as though they have just been in a car crash. They sit in a real damaged car and firefighters and paramedics demonstrate how they use their specialist equipment to free people trapped in vehicles.
The teenage boy, who is in the driver's seat, survives, but the crowd watch in silence as his girlfriend is released from the wreckage and put into a body bag. This is because in the scenario, she does not survive.
This powerful message stays with the young audience for a long time.
Mega Drive Event
This is an initiative currently run in East Cambs District, organised by the fire service.
It is similar to a Safety Zone but focuses just on road safety and is for sixth form and college students.
Different road safety partner agencies including the police, council road safety teams, ambulance service and drink and drug charities, come together to teach the students different aspects of road safety.
This can include a driving simulator to show the effects drinking alcohol and taking drugs has on your driving ability, a demonstration of firefighter cutting equipment, basic vehicle checks such as oil, tyre pressure and water, and information on the Highway Code.
Waterway driving demo
In partnership with council road safety teams, firefighters help teach young drivers how to drive safely along roads which run alongside waterways, including rivers and water-filled ditches.
A simulator is used to give young people a change to experience how frightening it is to roll in a vehicle.
Firefighters then demonstrate how difficult it can be to break the windscreen and windows of a car, which many drivers think would be easy enough if ever they became submerged in water.
The young audience is then given top tips on the best way to escape safely if they did find themselves in that situation.
