Carl J. Haddon
In my last article (Rurally Speaking: Strength in Numbers), I wrote about how 11 rural and career departments in Southern Louisiana banded together (unusual) to afford the costs of and share logistics for a six day (and night) NFPA 1403 acquired structure live fire training event in July. At the time of that article, I was in Louisiana as part of the advance team of instructors/coordinators planning and producing this huge training event. Even during the planning stages, these departments gained a wealth of knowledge about their neighboring departments, which included who had what resources on hand and who knew whom to help get us what we needed for this massive undertaking.
The “Burnin Down the Bayou” event took place in early July at a large elementary school complex which was slated for demolition and rebuilding immediately following our live fire training week. The event was the brain child of one relatively small fire department that had recently made the change from being a volunteer department to a career department. With budgets being tight, the realization was that it would never be able to bear the costs and logistics by itself, especially while trying to maintain full staffing and apparatus coverage for the fire district. That’s when this forward-thinking department decided it was time to engage its neighbor departments (both career and volunteer) to see if they could make some training magic happen. After all, it is rare in one’s career to be given a school complex for live fire training where the school district does all of the remediation on its dime (asbestos, mold, etc.) and then tells you, “You’re the fire department. Burn it however you see fit.”
As is the case with many small rural fire departments today, we don’t do or participate in a lot of the things we could or should because we say that the money is not there. We talk with fellow members from surrounding departments and we may or may not see each other on the fireground as mutual aid. BUT, do we really know the capabilities and depth of our surrounding departments? Do we train with each other like we probably should? Do we really shy away from opportunities such as this because we don’t want to expose our weaknesses to other departments? Or, do we not participate because we know we’re better than they are, and there’s no point in it? Or, is it because we are too small to meet NFPA standards, so we don’t need that kind of training? If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard one of these excuses in my travels, I’d be writing this article from my private tropical island.
As the planning for the training progressed, departments reached out to their local equipment and apparatus dealers for sponsorships of things like bottled water and firefighter lunches and dinners during the event. The responses that these 11 fire departments received was nothing short of amazing. Before the event even started, we had more support from the local business community, other state and local agencies, and the fire apparatus and equipment world than we ever could have imagined. These dealers reached out to their equipment manufacturers, who also stepped up to the plate by sending the latest and greatest demo equipment for instructors and students to use.
The format for the training was for each participating department to get three days of skills stations and live fire scenarios. We ran a morning session from 0800 to 1400 hours an