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By KEVIN NEVERS
There was, in all likelihood, no safer municipality in the entire State of
Indiana this past weekend—and will be no safer one this upcoming
weekend—than the Town of Chesterton, where 766 firefighters and EMS
personnel are converging for the 13th annual Duneland School of Emergency
Response, hosted as always by the Chesterton Fire Department.
The Duneland School is the largest of its kind in Indiana and this year is
its most successful ever, as a record number of students have enrolled for
classes on such topics as “Foam Operation for Dummies,” “Reading a Fire
Building,” and “Fire Streams to the Max.” Hands-on training is being
conducted throughout Duneland at a variety of venues: pump operation at
Chesterton Middle School, flashover simulation at Dogwood Park,
search-and-rescue refreshers at a couple of lease-backs in Tremont,
live-fire and smoke-trailer exercises at Bethlehem Steel Burns Harbor
Division.
Clearly, it’s not everybody’s idea of school—Bring your FULL PROTECTIVE
CLOTHING and prepare to get DIRTY! those enrolled in “Collapse Void Rescue”
are told—and indeed to a layman the course catalogue reads like so much
Greek: backdrafts, flashovers, fireground hydraulics, looped supply line
systems, engine pressures, fire physics.
Yet if you were to ask a firefighter what he or she does everyday, fighting
fires would probably be way down the list. And—contrary to what most of us
remember from the TV show Emergency—they don’t spend a whole lot of time
either lolling around the station cooking chili and waiting for calls.
“A lot of people don’t know that we do more than fight fires,” Chuck Stormer
of the Chesterton Fire Department told the Chesterton Tribune at the
school’s open house March 15. “I know that our title is ‘firefighter’ but we
do a lot more. We do rescues, we do hazardous materials, we do EMS.”
And Stormer’s list goes on: carbon monoxide investigations, confined space
rescues, rope rescues, accident extrications, downed power lines, equipment
maintenance, fire safety and prevention, code enforcement.
“To me,” Steve Harmon of the CFD said, “the Number One misimpression the
public has of us is that we sit around the fire station waiting for a fire.
We don’t. We have equipment to maintain. And training. People have no idea
of the time and training it takes for us to learn about our job.”
Wally Macchiarella of the Burns Harbor Volunteer Fire Department agreed.
“They just don’t know how much training we put in,” he said, “especially the
volunteers. All the hours away from home, away from the family, for the
betterment of the community.”
How much training exactly? Simply to achieve the minimum—or Level
1—certification requires, under guidelines established by the State of
Indiana and the National Fire Protection Association, 24 hours of course and
field work, Jamie Hicks of the CFD said. Level 2 requires more. Then come
the higher degrees of certification: Fire Officer 1, 2, 3, and 4. Above and
beyond, every firefighter must annually complete OSHA re-certification on
such issues as blood-borne pathogens, hazardous materials, and Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome. Meanwhile, firefighters who wish to become emergency medical
technicians must take fully 300 hours of courses, with an additional 24
hours of continuing education every year.
Not to mention the four to six hours per week spent brushing up on the
basics, picking up new techniques, honing and re-honing their chops. Ray
Wesley of the Liberty Township Volunteer Fire Department said that the LTVFD
devotes at least 100 manhours per month to training, while in 2002 the CFD
spent a total of 2,367 manhours on in-house training and 554 manhours on
outside training.
In short, firefighters are a little like soldiers, who spend their
professional lives preparing for contingencies, both the probable ones and
the improbable.
Still, even if their job remains, for most people, a mystery, the public
seems to know instinctively whom to call in a pinch. “We’re kind of the
go-to guys, the fill-all,” Harmon said. “If the police can’t handle it, if
the EMS can’t, we’re the ones who get the call.”
Do you smell an odd odor? Call the fire department.
Is your pet trapped in a heating vent? Call the fire department.
Has your child pushed his head through the banister and can’t pull it out?
Call the fire department.
Tony Coslett of the CFD recollected his strangest run—the strangest, that
is, that he was willing to discuss in mixed company. A woman, he said, had
lost something in her Lazy Boy recliner, crawled into the chair to extract
the item, and found herself stuck in it headfirst. It happens.
Rudy Jimenez of the CFD, on the other hand, has wrangled errant bats from
chimneys, waded through flooded basements, and scaled trees to rescue cats
(far better to let the cats rescue themselves, Jimenez advised; the sight of
a burly firefighter tends to scare the devil out of a cat and only prompts
it to climb higher).
For a fee, on the other hand, the Thorncreek Township Fire Department near
Columbia City will fill residents’ swimming pools, Rick Belna of TTFD said.
It’s a community service, he noted, but it’s also something else: more
training, on the tanker and the pumper.
Mark Clark of the TTFD remembered one occasion when his department attempted
to rescue a dog which had fallen through the ice in a local pond. The dog
died. Was it worth risking the firefighters’ own lives to try to save the
dog? A better question, Clark said, is this one: was it worth risking their
lives to keep the dog’s owner from falling through the ice himself?
So.
What do firefighters do for a living?
What don’t they do?
Posted 3/21/2003
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