Fire Camp, First-Half Report

Montour Falls Fire Academy

Week One of my intensive Fire Camp (Firefighter 1 course) is over. It was definitely intense. The 78-hour course, normally offered over many weeks of Mondays as well as some full-day classes on Saturdays, usually takes 6 to 9 months to complete. We do it in 12 days.

The first day was relatively light, but even that set the tone. We met some of our classmates as everyone arrived and unpacked, and by 1 we were in a large classroom. There were 36 students, and we were divided up into 8 units by virtue of where we sat, so each 'company' had 4 or 5 cadets. I ended up in a group with Roger, the other New Paltzer taking the course, as well as three boys who were all 16 or 17. One of them ended up quitting after the first day due, I guess, to exhaustion.

After class, which featured a video presentation about avoidable firefighter deaths, we headed to a large room that had once been a chapel. The room had a few obstacles for us to walk over or crawl thru during what is called the 'air consumption' test. In this exercise, all of us don our full gear (boots, pants, coats, hoods, and helmets) as well as our face pieces and air packs, which weigh an additional 20-30 pounds. The point of the exercise is to determine how long we can get our air tanks to last during strenuous exercise. Altho rated for 30 minutes, most packs will last between 15 and 20 minutes under heavy exercise or stress; I got about 20 minutes out of my tank. I just wish I'd thought to wear my knee pads because my fire pants ('bunkers') aren't padded, so my knees got bruised and cut, which affected all of my exercises for the rest of the week. Some people managed to bruise up their elbows. I think people must have pretty different ways to crawl.

The second day was really stenuous, featuring a maze that we had to crawl thru, fully geared and with our air tanks on, in the dark. The maze had stairs, a slide (not sure what house feature that was meant to represent), and some small crawl spaces that we had to squeeze thru. In order to make things really tricky, we had put tin foil in our face pieces so that we couldn't see anything; it turns out that when the smoke gets really hot, it fills up most of the room so that fire fighters have to crawl around with little or no visibility.

The maze took most of us over ten minutes, and it was near the end of his tour of it that our firefighting brother, Brian, realized he wasn't going to make it. He took off his face piece, announced "I'm going down," and passed out. A couple liters of IV fluids later, he was ok, and by dinner time, he was back with his company. He managed to finish the week in great shape both physically and academically. He's an EMT and nurse, so he knew what was happening with his body. Later he told me that he'd had to sit on the side, waiting for his turn, for nearly 25 minutes before going into the maze. On a hot day, that was more than enough to knock out anyone. So when it was my turn to wait for the maze, I kept cool and didn't don my face piece or gloves till the last second.

Academics claimed two students, tho they have a chance to redeem themselves in the next few days. At the end of the week was a 50-question test with a passing grade of 70. Two of the teens, one of whom was in my company, scored in the 60s, but luckily they'll get a 2nd chance to pass the test before the class resumes on Sunday. At the end of the 2nd week is a 100-question test with the same passing score of 70. Of course, that test covers more material, but I imagine it will actually be easier because I'm so used to the type of questions asked and because my test-prep book for the test seems to focus more on the work we covered during week 1.

My favorite hands-on activities were ladders and search-and-rescue. I wasn't especially good at the searching, and crawling around in full gear and on air is fairly tough all around, but it was pretty cool and was definitely excellent practice. The ladder exercise was fun. We had to hoist and erect ladders, one of which could extend to 35 feet, and climb up and down the side of a building; we even learned to carry someone sideways down a ladder, a great trust exercise. Operating various hoselines was fun, too, and it was also neat to learn how to break into different kinds of doors. We worked on our ropes all the time. Opening hydrants was fun, too. I also liked learning how to use a monster chain saw in order to cut into a metal door.

The hardest thing for me was the 2-minute donning. According to some regulations, we have to get fully geared up (with our air on) within 2 minutes. Because I'd never even put on a regulator before, this was harder for me than for those with more experience. Compounding things was the fact that my coat has both snaps and these latchy knobby things that I just couldn't get done quickly. I should have been able to don in about 90 seconds, but I also tended to panic, so I'd forget basic things like pulling my hood over the outside of my facepiece. I think that when we return in a week, I'll have no trouble with donning. It also helps that my lieutenant (in NP) lent me a coat with a zipper and Velcro, just in case.

The instructors are fantastic, averaging about 25 years of fire fighting a piece. Their styles varied -- some were avuncular, others militaristic, Most of them could get quite blue, but I never heard any of them yell at someone in a mean way, and in fact they were generally quite enthusiastic and encouraging. I look forward to returning there in a week, but I still have a lot of reading and studying to do before the big final exam.