Chino Valley Firefighters Undergo Confined Space Training

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The City of Chino Hills recently allowed the Chino Valley Fire District to do three days of training at their former City Hall, which also housed the Fire District's Administrative Headquarters from 1992 until the recent construction of a state of the art facility nearby.  The department's training division used the building, slated for demolition, to set up mazes for survival training exercises.

All of the Chino Valley Fire District's Firefighters and Chief Officers went through the training to familiarize themselves with the use of their breathing apparatus and confined space operations.  According to Deputy Chief of Operations Kirk Summers, "Within the maze it is is very claustrophobic.  There's wires.  There's obstacles they have to crawl over and under.  In some places they might have to take their breathing apparatus off and slide that in front of them."

The maze proved to be a challenging but valuable training tool.  Firefighter/Paramedic Pete Roebuck commented that the 12" x 12" reduced profile sections were the toughest part of the course, but getting through them gave him and his fellow firefighters a sense of accomplishment.

A separate building housed a smoke room, where the firefighters were able to go through a true to life scenario in which there was little to no visibility.  To enhance the difficulty of the experience, the firefighters were not allowed to use their personal lights.  Deputy Chief Summers explains, "It requires a lot of communication using a tag line so that the firefighters can find their way out, and the most important thing that it reinforces is teamwork.  There is a dummy in there, and they need to go do a large area search and find that dummy and rescue it."

Chino Valley Fire District Public Information Officer Massiel Ladron De Guevara says that the training proved to be very valuable in that it gave both new and seasoned firefighters the opportunity to practice realistic fire and rescue simulations in a safe environment.  She explains, "We have a lot of firefighters here with a tremendous amount of experience, and every time that they are able to come out here and get more experience, it just gives them more tools in which to work with when they are in real life situations."

The Chino Valley Fire District will have a brand new training facility under construction in 2010, which Deputy Chief Summers estimates will take one year to complete.


Author:Barbara Brooks - FDNNTV.com