Fire veteran Mike Harwood ends 57-year career with emotional last shift

‘Devastation unbelievable’

Harwood has responded to more than 60,000 callouts in his career.

Mike Harwood’s firefighting career spanned nearly six decades.

His last major job was the Mount Maunganui landslide.

Six holidaymakers died after a slip from Mauao hit the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park on January 22, following heavy rain.

This tragedy bookended his time as a firefighter as he started and finished helping with rescue efforts at landslides in Tauranga.

Lisa Maclennan died in the Mount Maunganui landslide on January 22 this year, the last job firefighter Mike Harwood attended, after warning other campers to evacuate.

He described structures that were swept away to the road and how he worked through mud that was 2m deep.

“The devastation was just unbelievable.”

He said these situations were especially dangerous because “when a building collapses there is always a chance of people being stuck in voids” but with landslides, the “mud is like a wall of water. It suffocates people or rips them apart”.

Mike Harwood has been praised for his “professionalism, loyalty, mentorship and camaraderie”.

‘Can you handle it, boy?’

Reflecting on his years of service, Harwood remembered his first major callout was to a dairy fire that killed a baby.

It was his first month on the job and he was a teenager.

He went home to his father, a World War II veteran who had lost his friends in the conflict and was badly injured in Italy before returning home.

Mike Harwood’s career has involved him being in some dangerous situations.

His father offered Harwood some words of advice and told him: “Well can you handle it, boy? ’Cause if you can’t, get out of it”.

Harwood said he thought about this moment a lot and that his father had been through far worse than anything he had seen in his career.

Mike Harwood began his firefighting career when he was a teenager.

This grounded him and has helped him to cope with devastating situations

“That’s life sometimes and I accept that because that’s what we do, that’s why we’re there to help.”

Harwood said he lived for the service and that “it gets in your blood”, but recently he began to lose that adrenaline rush and it became “just another job”.

“It’s my mind telling me something, you know? ‘You’ve served your time boy’.”

He said he began to finally consider retirement around Christmas, when he thought, “Oh, I’m nearly an 80-year-old firefighter”.

The 77-year-old has decided to step away from a job he’s been doing for 57 years.

“That was sort of a turning point. I sort of realised that I didn’t want to burn anybody by not being able to do my job.”

But he doesn’t believe he has retired, saying: “I’m on a long leave, that’s all”.

Harwood has received love and support from the community, with his retirement announcement reaching thousands of likes on Facebook.

“It’s amazing to read some of those [messages]. Some of the old names that are coming through go: ‘God, I thought he was dead’.”