Training Program for Volunteers Covers Basics, Remains Flexible
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In the world of the 1980s, all progressive fire departments recognize the importance of training, but few are so fortunate as the large city departments with a full-time training staff, wellequipped training facilities and career fire fighters available for training duty more frequently than their volunteer or on-call counterparts.
However, a well-organized, long-term training program is probably most important to the small volunteer department because the volunteer gets so much less on-the-job practice, and experience is so limited that a member’s entire fire service lifetime may see relatively few working fires spread over many years’ time.
Development of a long-term comprehensive program for these departments is often seen as an impossible task. Eight years ago we thought so, too, but by trial and error we have evolved a workable program that fits our department’s needs very well. Using the same approach, any department no matter how small can work up a comprehensive program that fits local needs: its community and its own hazards, its own personnel with their own strong points and limitations, and its own equipment and tactics.
Training realities
Some vitally important facts of life underlie any training program, large or small. First, no matter how much you want to, you can’t teach everything to everyone. The field of knowledge is so vast that the best you can hope for is to cover the general things and some specifics and develop a minimum level of skills for everyone. Then trust the basic curiosity and common sense of the person who becomes a fire fighter to fill in the gaps.
Second, no matter how well you cover a topic the first time, you must have opportunity for review and practice at regular intervals. This also builds in “make-up” instruction for the volunteer who was unable to be at the session that covered the material the first time.
Otherwise by the time your trainee actually needs the knowledge or skill you thought he learned five years ago, he will have forgotten much of the material. Skills will have become too rusty for effective use.
Plentywood Volunteer Fire Department Training Program, July 1, 1980-June 30, 1981
Total time offered: meetings, 22 hours; courses, 120 hours; maintenance duty, 8 hours; spring and fall sessions, 12 hours. Total scheduled, 162 hours. Other courses and programs available for credit when taken.
* From November through April, little outdoor work is scheduled because of normally severe winter weather in northeastern Montana. Cold weather problems are extensively discussed during the remainder of the program, but conditions are considered too brutal for personnel to work outdoors unnecessarily.
Deciding what to teach
Several types of instruction must be offered without regard to specific subject matter. Classroom or lecture sessions cover general or background knowledge—the why topics of fire fighting. Skills—the hands-on how of equipment operation, communications techniques, teamwork evolutions, and the learning of judgment—come only with informed and directed experience.
The first step in developing an overall departmental program is to decide specifically what background knowledge and what skills will be taught. Which ones underlie everything else? Then, evaluate the available training time in terms of cost-effective use of the time. The key here lies in teaching something to everyone present as much of the time as possible. For example, if you have 15 fire fighters at a drill, it may not be the most effective use of the time to teach one-person skills if one person learns by teaching, one learns by doing, and 13 discuss a ballgame.
A much better use of the time would be to divide the group into smaller teams. Perhaps one group would work on a company evolution, one on ventilation or forcible entry techniques, another on a ladder drill, and the newest fire fighter could receive individual instruction on the one-person skill you started with. Certainly, all are not covering the same material; you need more instructors and it requires more planning. But all are learning something useful, the instructors are probably learning more than those they teach, and the planning isn’t really all that difficult once you decide ahead of the time what you are going to do.
Plentywood profile
As one example of how this approach to program development works, look at the program in use in our small department. The Plentywood Volunteer Fire Department is an all-volunteer dual department of 28 members, serving the isolated city of Plentywood, Mont., and the surrounding 800-square-mile Plentywood Rural Fire Protection District, with a total population of about 4500 people. The city department owns two engines and the rural district owns an engine and a tanker. There are standing mutual aid agreements between the city and the rural district, and between the rural district and four neighboring rural districts. The region is primarily agricultural but with rapidly increasing petroleum exploration and production plus the accompanying hazards.
The department has 11 monthly 2 1/2-hour training sessions in each year and a six-hour multicompany mandatory drill in the spring and in the fall. The membership is divided into fourman teams, with each team responsible for weekly inspection and minor maintenance of all departmental equipment for a month at a time, at six-month intervals. Quarterly, one of four courses is offered: recruit firefighter, 15 hours; pump operation, 12 hours; officer course, 12 hours; or first aid and ambulance support operations, about 24 hours.
Minimum 30 hours
Other courses, such as the DOT EMT course, various oilfield-related courses, hazardous materials, etc., are offered as instructors and materials are available, generally from other organizations, including the Montana State Fire Services Training School. Each member is required to participate in a minimum of 30 hours of instruction annually to maintain membership. Naturally, some just barely make the 30 hours while others make much more.
In our program, basic initial classroom and skills training is provided in the appropriate quarterly course, with the remainder of the regularly scheduled training used to refresh skills and knowledge. The overall program is scheduled on a two-year rotation, with four different target hazards each year. This provides a plan of initial and refresher instruction in basic classroom subjects plus individual and team skills. The plan still remains flexible enough to adapt to changing situations or opportunity for special programs that might be available.
The monthly departmental meetings are used as refresher training for company-level operations in small teams, or for familiarization with local target hazards, followed by a 1/2-hour session of classroom instruction, review or film. Six of these 11 monthly sessions cover basic engine company operations directed by the officer in charge of each unit. Each month, each unit drills on a specific type of evolution.
The basics, with flexibility
The attendance at each meeting is divided into three groups, with each group manning a piece of equipment. Over a three-month period, each fire fighter has opportunity to practice each of the three principal evolutions the department uses. Of course, in the process individual skills are used and therefore practiced, including hose work, pump operation, forcible entry and ventilation, company level communications, etc. When desired, a different sort of problem can be substituted into the rotation. This provides very necessary flexibility, but still assures that the basics will be covered during the two-year period.
The semiannual six-hour sessions are used partially to practice skills at individual and company levels but more importantly to practice the vital but seldom-used “Command – Control -Communications” skills needed in multicompany operations.
Weekly maintenance
Weekly inspection and maintenance times are used to maintain equipment readiness, obviously, but also to maintain each member’s familiarity with equipment location and operation. This is under the supervision of the team officer. It assures refreshment of individual skills, since in order for a member to tell if a piece of equipment is in operating condition he must know how it operates.
By advance planning of the material to be covered, and by fitting types of instruction to the type of attendance expected at the times available, our department has developed an effective and workable long-term training program. It has paid off, not only in better trained fire fighters and officers, but also in greater interest among the members and vastly better meeting attendance. We made it work, and your department can too!