Winter Haven Fire Department serves the growing community of Winter Haven, Florida, providing fire suppression, EMS, rescue, and other emergency services.
This page is for the people who know the department best. Share your experience with station life, department culture, leadership, training, equipment, staffing, schedule, morale, and overall quality of life at WHFD. Whether you currently work here, worked here in the past, or have firsthand experience with the department, give future firefighters an idea of what it’s really like behind the bay doors.
Keep it respectful, keep it useful, and keep it real. The good, the bad, and everything in between.
After working for the WHFD for several years, the area has loads of potential and could be one of the premier departments, but behind the facade, this department is nothing but an up-and-coming joke. The operational fire fighters are incredibly underpaid and understaffed. We get a new chief, and while evidently clear the department is understaffed, he takes away the one caveat that our department had, which was not running all calls (Alpha Bravo calls such as headaches, toe pain, etc.) While no one has been able to justify it to the staff—that while we understand the citizens need to be run—this leaves the city with no resources from the fire department to run critical calls that require us to have an ALS truck.
We are one of the busiest departments when it comes to unit utilization in the surrounding area and the most underpaid, undoubtedly. After multiple attempts to gain raises that match the surrounding cities, it is nothing but a slap in the face being told we don’t deserve such, but giving the city commissioners a raise. While after having countless month long negotiations with the city to get much closer to Lakeland’s city pay, we were told this past year that we are not Lakeland and cannot be compared to them. Then not even a year later the city commissioners demanded to have equal pay to Lakeland and were granted this with under a month of negotiations while we were turned away with a laughable raise and for lack of better words, told to kick rocks.
For anyone thinking of coming to this department, to give you a better picture, the new hires under two years barely made a dollar raise, if that. While not only are we now running every single call that comes in, and while I agree that the citizens deserve to have calls answered, but instead of hiring more personnel, we are always behind the eight ball of having to fill in spots of personnel who have left due to the conditions. They now have us spending countless shifts painting the stations instead of hiring a crew or volunteers, which delays the response time to calls, especially after the department was reprimanded for turnout times by admin.
At the end of the day, this city wants to put on a front and say they are thankful and commend us for our service, but there’s not much to show for it when you are essentially made to be understaffed, underpaid, disrespected jack-of-all-trades handymen. No one gets into the fire service to make money and be rich with that being said it’s not possible to work for winter haven as a new fire fighter and afford to live in the city.
This new administration wants to act like they have our back and will do everything they can for us but after almost a year in I can confidently say nothing has changed and things have gotten worse. If I hadn’t already put time in at this department I can confidently say it’s not one I would ever come to and with that being said it’s one that I don’t plan on staying at.
Rating Breakdown
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1 Review on “Winter Haven Fire Department”
After working for the WHFD for several years, the area has loads of potential and could be one of the premier departments, but behind the facade, this department is nothing but an up-and-coming joke. The operational fire fighters are incredibly underpaid and understaffed. We get a new chief, and while evidently clear the department is understaffed, he takes away the one caveat that our department had, which was not running all calls (Alpha Bravo calls such as headaches, toe pain, etc.) While no one has been able to justify it to the staff—that while we understand the citizens need to be run—this leaves the city with no resources from the fire department to run critical calls that require us to have an ALS truck.
We are one of the busiest departments when it comes to unit utilization in the surrounding area and the most underpaid, undoubtedly. After multiple attempts to gain raises that match the surrounding cities, it is nothing but a slap in the face being told we don’t deserve such, but giving the city commissioners a raise. While after having countless month long negotiations with the city to get much closer to Lakeland’s city pay, we were told this past year that we are not Lakeland and cannot be compared to them. Then not even a year later the city commissioners demanded to have equal pay to Lakeland and were granted this with under a month of negotiations while we were turned away with a laughable raise and for lack of better words, told to kick rocks.
For anyone thinking of coming to this department, to give you a better picture, the new hires under two years barely made a dollar raise, if that. While not only are we now running every single call that comes in, and while I agree that the citizens deserve to have calls answered, but instead of hiring more personnel, we are always behind the eight ball of having to fill in spots of personnel who have left due to the conditions. They now have us spending countless shifts painting the stations instead of hiring a crew or volunteers, which delays the response time to calls, especially after the department was reprimanded for turnout times by admin.
At the end of the day, this city wants to put on a front and say they are thankful and commend us for our service, but there’s not much to show for it when you are essentially made to be understaffed, underpaid, disrespected jack-of-all-trades handymen. No one gets into the fire service to make money and be rich with that being said it’s not possible to work for winter haven as a new fire fighter and afford to live in the city.
This new administration wants to act like they have our back and will do everything they can for us but after almost a year in I can confidently say nothing has changed and things have gotten worse. If I hadn’t already put time in at this department I can confidently say it’s not one I would ever come to and with that being said it’s one that I don’t plan on staying at.