After about six months as a volunteer, we had our live-fire training. This was the big day we all looked forward to. This was the day we put on our bunker gear for real and walked into a building on fire.
We had completed all of the classroom work and performed all of the necessary skills practice, but this was going to be the real thing! Or as close as you can get to the real thing during training.
We loaded up all of our bunker gear in the engine and set off for the burn field. It was about 30 minutes from the station. We arrived at what could only be described as a field with a very small house on it - a 1 bedroom house that looked as if it was going to collapse without a fire!
We set up all of our equipment on tarps near the engine and had our briefing. The fire would be real, but it would be burning hay in the corner of the room. We would work a scenario as if we were dispatched to a call and had just arrived.
We had been practicing donning (putting on) our bunker gear for some time now, so we were pretty quick to get ready. The hose lines were set up for us but we had to ask for water. Rescue Randy, our training dummy (if you can call it that these days) was trapped inside the house.
We started with a closed door and smoke pouring out of every crack in the building. We checked the door to see if it was hot (to see if the fire was directly behind the door), which it was not. We opened the door and sent in our search team. We searched each room on our hands and knees, feeling for any signs of Rescue Randy. We eventually found him and dragged him, again on our hands and knees, out of the front door. We didn’t help much, that lazy bum!! We had to do all the work!
We saved Randy and moved on to the fire attack. We advanced the charged hose line through the front door and into the fire room. The room was smoky, but you could see most everything from your hands and knees. The firefighters talked about “penciling” the water, spraying water above the fire in short bursts to cool the air above and rain water down on the fire.
We eventually put the fire out and backed out of the structure. We ran through several scenarios with a combination of search and rescue and fire attack. By the end of the day I was utterly exhausted! We had rescued Randy who knows how many times from this tiny house and he never thanked us once! Don’t know why he kept going back in, but he did.
After the fire we loaded up the engine and headed back to the station. Once there we unrolled all of the hose and unloaded all of the tools to wash them. Once we had finished washing everything we were finally free to go home. It was a very exciting and eventful day, but it was hard work! I didn’t realize just how much went into it until I had done it!!
Training had already set my mind on a career change to firefighting, and live fire set it in stone. I had decided I no longer wanted to study electrical engineering, I wanted to fight fires and help people. What does firefighting have to do with electrical engineering? Absolutely nothing! It was completely different. Every call was completely different. Every situation we responded to was different and required us to think outside the box. Instead of a job that would put me behind a desk every day for the rest of my life, I could have a job where I showed up for work not knowing what I would have to do that day. I was excited! But what to do next?