Water gushes from a red hose behind the Tauranga fire station. Firefighters are filling a 10m deep concrete cavity to practise pumping out water, as they might on a flooded ship. Everyone has his job. Or her job. It is not until the helmets come off you realise one of the firefighters is female.
In a field still dominated by men, qualified firefighter Xavier Kennedy holds her own. While about half New Zealand's population is female, a national fire service spokesman says just 3 per cent of professional firefighters are women. He says the figure has changed "minimally" from 10 years ago when Ms Kennedy joined the fire service at twenty-six.
The Mount Maunganui resident volunteered with the fire service in Tauranga for two years, then applied for a paid spot. The seven-month application process involved hours of written and physical tests designed to cull hundreds of candidates vying for a few spots.
Ms Kennedy says the three-month recruits' course thinned the ranks even more. "We had 25 in our course and 20 passed. One guy broke his collar bone, another did his back, another had a heart attack, another broke his finger, and one female was unsuccessful."
The pressure Ms Kennedy says she endured in childhood helped prepare her for a service career. Her mother died when she was four, and she and her sister were "worked really hard" " forced to dig holes and disciplined severely. She says she attended a "rough school" near Huntly, where nearly all her friends became teen mums and dropped out.
"I just had this self-belief that there's more than this, that education's the only way out of poverty, any hard situation."
She left home at 14 to live with a teacher, cleaning house, nannying and tending an orchard in exchange for room and board.
"It was just so hard, but I knew I had to keep going, because I knew [otherwise] I wouldn't amount to anything."
She's one of seven children, but has cut family ties. "I walked away and never looked back."
Looking forward meant studying fitness at the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic before becoming a gym instructor and working on cruise ships. "Being a fitness fanatic saved me. I had friends into drugs, but I was too into my fitness. It kept me on track."
Ms Kennedy's track today is the Mount Maunganui fire station, where she and another woman make up half a four-person crew, which she says is the only team of its kind in the country. She also worked in Wellington for six years, where her most memorable fire was at film-maker Peter Jackson's warehouse. "I had to cut into the roller doors. It was huge " we spent a day-and-a-half there."
It's not just big fires that make Ms Kennedy light up. She says she loves going to work each day, because every call's important, from extracting a dog in a drain to saving a person in a house fire.
"Storms, floods, rescues " we do it all."
She loves the physicality of her profession, working with hoses, ladders, axes and pumps. Her station covers about 900 calls a year and also presents education programmes for children and performs home safety checks.
Ms Kennedy says she's never felt singled out. "Probably because I've been in that sector of discrimination my whole life, being female, Maori and gay. I tick all the boxes. I think the guys do look at me as one of the guys because I'm quite different."
The firefighter says shortly after joining the service, her peers recognised she was up to the task. "They need to see you can do it and that's the way it should be, because we all have each other's life in our hands. We work real well as a crew, and everyone brings something to the table. I'm always going in the roof and under floors 'cause I'm small."
Her boss, Mount Maunganui Fire Brigade station officer Terry Mills says, "she's reliable, and with her Wellington experience, has probably seen more action than most".
Ms Kennedy says she loves the teamwork required for firefighting and has two families: the one she's made with her partner, Donna, and four-year-old daughter, and her fire station family, with whom she works four shifts per week, spending two nights away from home.
"We cook together, clean together, we do training, we're all on the computer together, we watch TV ... I found my calling in the Fire Service. I'll do this as long as I can and I'm hoping to do 20 years at least from now."
Tauranga Bay of Plenty area commander Murray Binning says the fire service is trying to diversify. "Recruiting of females is entrenched into the organisation. There's very disproportionate numbers. It's still probably seen as a male thing, but many females, even though they're not as big as men, are able to do the job." Mr Binning says of the approximately 70 firefighting staff at three Tauranga stations (Greerton, Tauranga and Mount Maunganui), four are female. A national Fire Service spokesman says the organisation has testing days for females to check their strength for the physical test.