Where firefighters come to talk training

Saving Our Own/Self Rescue

Do any of the departments that you guys belong to have a saving our own/ Self Rescue training that talks about advanced rescue techniques? I'm looking for things like ladder bails, nance drills, denver drills, etc...

I'm trying to talk the cheifs into letting me put on an advanced RIT training all day on a saturday (I know, I know, my saturdays are valuable too!)... They seem to think that people won't want to come to it if it's longer than 2 hours. My viewpoint is that we have a lot of new folks (1/3 of our department has less than 3 years experience) and we need this information passed on. I see a huge gap in knowledge in this very important subject. Am I overreacting? Asking too much?

Thanks,
JJ

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Larry Lasich on April 29, 2009 at 12:04am

Brother, you do not want me to hear that "two hour" stuff.
I just had a Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday 'till 3pm training with a bunch of hard chargin' vollies. We were doing burn trailer, RIT, car fires, wildland, size up, IC and self rescue until the cows came home. I mean we were no kidding working in a cow field! Sunday it was snowing.

Tell the nay sayers that you care about their wives and kids more than they do, that should get a rise out of them.

Things like ladder bail out takes extream caution to train for. Like SCBA confined space, it gives confedence, but unlike blackout drills, you can get people hurt. Have a care and good luck trying to get everyone up to speed.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by JJ Hastings on April 29, 2009 at 9:15am

Larry - It's good to see that I'm not the only person that feels we as a profession need to be ready for anything...

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Michael Bricault (ret) on April 29, 2009 at 1:44pm

-JJ, I'm happy to hear that your department is looking at self rescue. It is an absolutely essential skill set that all firefighters must have; no exceptions.
-My department does teach this in basic training and through annual department wide, mandatory refreshers. Unfortunately, the basic class is 16 hours and the refresher is 8 hours.
-My advise would be to contact Jim McCormack at FDTN, the Fire Dept Training Network in Indianapolis for training as well as train the trainer courses. Jim does an excellent job with this topic and his training is very the best available.

▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

RSS

Welcome to
Fire Engineering Training Community

Sign Up
or Sign In

Or sign in with:

Policy Page

PLEASE NOTE

The login above DOES NOT provide access to Fire Engineering magazine archives. Please go here for our archives.

CONTRIBUTORS NOTE

Our contributors' posts are not vetted by the Fire Engineering technical board, and reflect the views and opinions of the individual authors. Anyone is welcome to participate.

For vetted content, please go to www.fireengineering.com/issues.

We are excited to have you participate in our discussions and interactive forums. Before you begin posting, please take a moment to read our community policy page.

Be Alert for Spam
We actively monitor the community for spam, however some does slip through. Please use common sense and caution when clicking links. If you suspect you've been hit by spam, e-mail peter.prochilo@clarionevents.com.