CHARGING NOWHERE: November Issue

NEW Fire Engineering editorial cartoon: Charging Nowhere.

This commentary came to me while presenting Get Fired Up at a regional fire conference where an instructor was boasting about how his training academy was using nothing but dollhouses and YouTube videos to train their people. Boasting! They have a burn building that's gathering cobwebs and feel pulling dry hose is a replacement for actual live fire training. "It takes too long to clean the equipment and wash dirty hose, so we simulate everything."

Seriously?!

Videos can be a great training aid, and I'm sure the dollhouse fires have their place (I've never attended that class nor training), but to use nothing else is reckless and misleading.

In my humble opinion, there's is absolutely no substitute for pulling and deploying charged lines, reloading them and doing it again. Flowing real water onto live fire, deploying ladders and climbing them, and using real saws to cut wood and steel... I could go on!

My pal Ej always recited, "The more you sweat during training, the less you bleed during battle!" You can't get that from simulated firefighting!

Stay Fired Up, and train like your life, and your partner's life, depends on it!

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