Twenty-five Amsterdam firefighters and ten other fire service staff are heading to Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro, on a trip centred on their mental health.
Organiser Hans Wijnand, 58, says some are going to recharge, some have been through a divorce or other hard times, and some want to let off steam.
He won’t push anyone to talk, but he expects their experiences to come up on the mountain.
A tram crash that came back months later
Among them is Peter Westerbeek, a commander at the Nico fire station by the IJtunnel, who has served 26 years.
In February 2025 he attended a crash in which a 13-year-old boy on a bike was trapped under a tram, and he later heard the boy had survived.
Months later, a photo of a different tram crash shown at a resilience training set off a physical stress reaction in him, and he spent four months at home before returning to work with a psychologist’s help.
More room to talk
Westerbeek says his generation was taught to cry in private, but emotions have had more attention over the past four years.
Wijnand says child resuscitations, fatal house fires, suicides and the recent explosion in Osdorp weigh especially heavily on firefighters.