This last week Fitchburg Firefighters were honing their skills on moving hoses into large buildings. While there it may appear to be a simple task, there is a lot of quick decisions that need to be made to ensure a good come for all of those involved.
When asked about this training, Lieutenant Dana Collins said, "As always, we train so that we can be proficient in this evolution and be ready when we need to use it on at an incident. We try hard to resemble what it will be like on a real scene; by doing so, this training only helps us as we try to make our actions become second nature on the evolution and reinforces the techniques needed to do the job at hand."
During this particular drill, the firefighters were training on what we refer to as an "Apartment Line" evolution. In this scenario, one firefighter got off the truck at the fire hydrant and started to attach the supply hose to the hydrant; and then joined the rest of the crew who went to "extinguish the fire." The officer pulled the orange hose (apartment line) and the firefighter pulled the green hose (attack line) from the truck. They then attached the green hose to the orange hose and proceeded to find the fire (located in the apparatus bay). Once the crew found the fire, They "extinguished" the fire by flowing water once they had done this, the evolution was complete.
"The key to training is this: train hard and be prepared to find better ways to do things or find things that maybe need to be changed." said Collins.