ZFSC 2018
Zagreb Firefighter Stair Challenge, a humanitarian firefighter race up the stairs, was held on December 1st, 2018 in the VMD building, 20 Strojarska Street, in Zagreb. This humanitarian event was organized by firefighters for the sixth year in a row. With the event, we were raising money for the Hummingbirds Association, the Association of Parents of Vitally Endangered Children, and primarily for Cough Assist device. The price of the device itself is 35.400,00 HRK, and with the whole event we raised 35.105,44 HRK. The device was bought and delivered to a girl who needs it indispensably. Before the event, we organized an open public training on the Dolac stairs, near Kumice so we could inform the citizens about our humanitarian event.
Since the first year, the race had an international character because from the beginning, we had our ‘gasilci’ from Slovenia with us. But this year, we were joined by two contestants from Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, two children from Norway, and even 27 firefighters from Slovenia. Of course, most firefighters were from Croatia, both volunteer and professional ones; from Osijek and Aljmaš, Koprivnica and Križevci, Bjelovar, Imbriovac, Čakovec, Varaždin, Zagreb, Velika Gorica, Samobor, Karlovac, Korenica, Knin, Delnice and Ogulin, Rijeka, Opatija, Mali Lošinj and Krk, Pula, Lovran, Šibenik and Perković , all the way to Dubrovnik and many other smaller towns.
Every year more and more contestants are involved, and this year we included firefighting children and youth in the race. There were 14 of them, and the total was 203 firefighters, of which two contestants dropped out of the race on the 13th floor. The race is divided into categories. Easy is a category in which children and youth compete, and they only wear a fire helmet. In the Open category, all operative firefighters compete wearing protective equipment, while the strongest Open and Strong categories are those in which firefighters, apart from the protective equipment, are equipped with insulating devices with a composite or steel bottle. The categories are also divided by gender and age groups.
After they put on the equipment, firefighters have to climb 31 floors or 666 stairs of the double staircase as quickly as possible. In addition to the above mentioned, firefighters also exit the building on the ground floor, they do a circle around it and return into the building to continue up the same staircase to the last floor where there is a terrace overlooking Zagreb.
Brave Hummingbirds were also cheering the firefighters and they were with us at the awards ceremony for the fastest. It should be mentioned that the fastest competitors reached the top in only five minutes.
Considering that all entry fees were proceeded to the associations, volunteers and sponsors made sure that the event was successfully organized and conducted: VMD Group, Amusement Radio, Florian Service, Stotinka, Titan, UHS, Easy Going Store, Megaprint, etc. Zagreb Firefighters would like to once again express their gratitude to all those who helped in any way to organize and conduct the event, to the contestants and to those who helped financially, and to all the media who talked and wrote about our humanitarian event. We showed once again that firefighters have big hearts and that together we can achieve a lot.
You can find the results of 2018 race on the following link:
https://www.stotinka.hr/eng/event/750
