A firefighter in Highland Park, MI spent a year with a small wide-angle camera glued to his helmet, and then cut the footage into a video that basically shows that he is more manly than you’ll ever dream of being.
YouTube user HPZ1442, a professional firefighter who apparently makes a habit of posting full length recordings of fires he fights online, describes the eight-minute supercut as simply “a bunch of clips from some of the better helmet cam footage I got this year while fighting fires in Highland Park.”
We love doing our job in Highland Park. And we do it often. Our aggressive attack might seem odd to some since most of these are “vacant” homes. But we are here to put fires out and the best way to do that is from the inside.
He’s not kidding. In the course of eight minutes, he goes into burning buildings, yanks flaming doors off of buildings with an axe, bashes holes in the walls while fire gouts out of them, and basically does lots of dangerous stuff as if it’s his job. Which it is.
Needless to say, the YouTube comments are full of armchair firefighters bitching about what he’s doing wrong, you know, because it’s an amazing idea to tell the guy, with the axe, that he sucks. But aside from that, this video is pretty amazing, and a relief, as to paraphrase Neal Stephenson, the role of manliest man on Earth has already been filled, so we can stop pretending we’re it.