Day One….
October 9th, 2005
For the next 2 weeks I’ll be here at Texas’ Training Division Emergency Training Center. Coming January, TD will have a brand new facility of their own (I may have to come back and stoke a few fires for them so I can see the new digs heehee!), until then we got to live, eat and breathe true firehall life at the Briaroaks Firehall. Here’s our first day….
As with any school, we get picture days too:
Our whole class. Out of a class of 20, ten of us were from Canadia (what the Texans called us) and the rest, 9 were from Texas and1 from Oklahoma.
Meet Class 19 (the best class TD has seen yet!):
We were divided into Engine Companies as well, meet Engine 2: L – R, Lieutenant Tsujimura (Whistler), Firefighter Werring (Abbotsford), Firefighter Peterson (Vancouver), and me Firefighter Haley (North Vancouver):
Jumping ahead justa little, here’s the group after a full day on the burn ground (I’m the little one front row, middle):
Ok, so the first day of training was all about our Personal Protective equipment (PPE).
Here we are getting used to our turnout gear, or bunker gear and practising how to put it all on really fast. We should be able to get fully and properly dressed in 60 seconds or less.
From now on it was called “60 seconds”…..
…and any Instructor at any time could be there to call “60 seconds” and have all 20 of us running for the door, fumbling for our gear, and scrambling to get it all on in time…
…as the Instructor would calmly look on with a stopwatch in hand. We even had to do this in our second week once in the middle of the night and once in the wee hours of the morning…..