For my graduation thesis, I decided to explore the traumatic experiences of the interventions experienced by members of the volunteer firefight departments in order to determine how social work methods could intervene in the situation. I focused on volunteer firefight department in Sp. Pirniče. I consider natural disasters, such as floods, landslides and earthquakes, to be traumatic events in firefighting practice, in which volunteer firefighters are increasingly involved in rescuing and eliminating the consequences. Another type of catastrophic events are those mostly triggered by the human factor, such as forest fires, buildings and industrial plants fires and explosions, complicated traffic accidents, etc. Climate change which is increasingly affecting Slovenia is leading to various natural disasters, so I focused on the professional perspective of firefighters regarding climate change and consequently natural disasters where firefighters can share their knowledge with the civilian population, and educate them. In all these events, firefighters are potentially exposed to serious trauma as they experience many horrors at interventions, e.g. injuries to people and animals, particularly painful deaths, mutilated corpses, etc. Therefore, firefighters are exposed to the constant possibility of serious psychological and psychosocial traumatization. In the thesis, I researched the existent practices of processing the traumatic events, with the goal of determining how social work with its methodology of psychosocial assistance could intervene and help.
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