Feb 15 Third Thursday Training

A busy and productive training session for the seven of us who attended. Temps were around 30 degF but PPEs and crawling around on the floor make you warm.

WVFD Fire Chief Mike Geraci's email this morning:

Great training session last night……..

Hose maze always a good reminder of the basics to ensure we all go home at the end of an incident and the drafting / nursing enabled us to increase our confidence in our ability to sustain a water supply.

Appreciate all the enthusiasm and participation.

Make plans to attend the FF Association meeting next Tuesday. FF of the year / Rookie of the year recognition. Covered dish as well. I don’t have the details on time and location nailed down. Lisa, can you help with that????

Be looking for details on our Mod I course schedule shortly.

Thanks again for all the support, Mike

And there you have it. Several things were going on.

First up was setting up and filling the drop tank, a big swimming pool thing for holding a couple thousand gallons of water for general drafting by trucks on the scene. NO PROBLEMS! Unless you count wanting to move 500 gallons of water instead of moving the truck. NOTE: use padding under the tank. Sometimes we have to walk around in the swimming pool, and don't want to poke holes. Also - close up the drain before pumping water into tank :-)

Second: Hose Maze! Prizes for the fastest (The Unknown Firefighter and I won at 7 minutes). Lisa set up a maze of snaking hoses in the firehouse and the object is to crawl about and follow them with PPE and BA tanks, blind, with hoods pulled down over the face masks and in the dark. TUF is an excellent navigator with great communication skills. Smooth bump bump to the pump! - Mike

Third: Drafting into the Margarita truck from the drop tank. Couldn't have gone better. Should have photographed the setup for documentation. Got the pump primed quickly, started it up, and the truck was sucking water into the pump and out of the booster hose.

Fourth: Nursing by the Margarita from the Tanker. Setup was a little slower - we'd done it before about six weeks ago and no one wrote anything down. Note to me: bring camera! Finally figured out the connections. We need a properly sized connector for hooking the six-inch hose at the Margarita intake. Were reduced to using the 2-inch (?) intake with a reducer coupling, but we DID figure it out. The pumper then sucks water directly out of the tanker and pumps it directly into a hose.

Fifth: Cleanup and refilling of the tanker. No problem - we've got that down.

It was a three-hour session but everyone was pleased.

--Wayne