Over the past several days, firefighters have been training at the Roanoke Regional Airport.
They also staged an emergency drill.
The Roanoke Times covered the event in a photo gallery. Check it out here.
Battalion Chief Steve Poff (Ret.) is once again gracing us with a great class on suspended ceilings. The class goes over the basics of how to free yourself if you are caught up in a suspended ceiling. The class also covers many case studies where firefighters have been caught in fallensuspended ceilings. This coupled with the lightweight truss construction has killed many firefighters. Suspended ceilings can also hide many dangers for firefighters including the fire itself. The class was great, and we all learned a lot.
BC Poff covered lightweight truss construction as well. The following class is supposed to cover the building type in depth.
If you do not know the issues with lightweight truss construction and how quickly they fail in fire conditions then you need to learn about it now. One way to start is to check out the link below. This is the online course Poff talked about in the class.
http://www.uluniversity.us/home.aspx
After going to the site you will see NEW USER on your far right at the top. Register and complete the form and save. In the links in the middle of the page find Fire Safety Online Courses which takes you to another page. Scroll down and find Structural Stability of Engineered Lumber in Fire Conditions. Start the course.
The photos show the attendees doing some hands cutting on with various hand tools. Thanks to BC Bishop for snapping the photos
Roanoke Station 13 C Shift trained on Ladder 13 the other day. The idea for training came from VentEnterSearch.com. If you have not viewed the website, it is a must read. Both myself and Captain Willie Wines Jr. have had articles posted on the site and have utilized the site for training and other ideas. The collaboration of so many great ladder draggers has proved to be very insightful for many things that I had not even thought of before. Even though I am not a ladder dragger, I have been able to utilize ideas for basic firefighting as well as hone my knowledge of truck work. After all, I have to be able to ride the truck just as well as the engine. In addition, how often do you find hose jockeys doing truck work in Roanoke due to our short staffing on our ladder trucks.
Back to our training though. 1st Lt. Sam Stump and Lt. Dean Russell led the rest of us in this very easy to set up training drill. Basically, we set up 3 cones on the roof of Station 13. Then we attached a cone to a rope on the end of the aerial of Ladder 13. One by one, cone by cone we manuevered the aerial to place the cone on the aerial on top of the cone sitting on the station. The drill was very simple to set up, did not take very long to complete.
For this and more ideas on Training, visit VentEnterSearch.com
