Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Davis Tech celebrates a new fire academy location with enhanced training facilities.
- The site includes dynamic setups for realistic, scenario-based firefighter training.
- Fire chiefs praise the new facilities for improving firefighter preparedness and skills.
CLEARFIELD — Gannon O'Malley, a firefighter with the Roy Fire Department, has been on the job for a total of one week. The one thing he can say about his job, so far, is how grateful he is for the preparation he received at the fire academy's Davis Technical College site.
The classes were tough enough to ensure that students understood the difficulty of the work, O'Malley said, and the instructors were informative enough to let them know what they would need when emergency struck.
Despite all that he learned, O'Malley says he is still a little jealous of all the extra training contraptions and appliances future students will have access to in order to prepare in a more tactile manner for life as a firefighter at the new fire academy site at Davis Tech.
"As far as the skills go, we'll still be taught all the same stuff," he said. "I just think having the dynamic setup is really going to keep you on your toes and create a better-thinking firefighter. You're not familiarizing yourself with the same layout. They're going to make sure you're constantly thinking, and that will turn out some of the best firefighters."
On Tuesday morning, Davis Tech welcomed fire chiefs, local firefighters, Davis Tech leadership and others to the space to see for themselves the advancements made to academy education.
When the fire academy started in 2007, there was not a traditional "firefighter school" in the sense of imagining locations and how to fight specific types of fire, according to Jared Sholly, an instructor and emergency service training officer. Instead, there were employed or volunteer firefighters sharing what they knew about the job or participating in training themselves, he said.
Before the new space, students were trained in a "tower" — a space that allowed for the potential firefighters to run up and down stairs and train in confined spaces.
Sholly and others saw the need to increase the on-the-job learning, which students were not experiencing. In 2012, they finally had the space to create an active training site where students could move through homes, stores, cars — wherever they could be called to deal with a fire emergency.
"We can put the student in a real-life scenario and have them deal with something that is realistic. The more they can obtain that information, the more successful they're going to be," Sholly said.
The training site has a home inside the space that also has bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and even a television set in a living room. Students will now be able to move through the house as if they were saving a life in a bedroom or kitchen, learning how to deal with nearby walls, fallen floors and unstable stairs.
A bonus feature has to do with the ability to move the walls around so that the house you were training in one day will not have the same layout on the next training day, allowing for increased on-the-spot thinking in a new environment, said Josh Gardner, an instructor at the fire academy and a firefighter at the Roy Fire Department.
A faux store also has walls that can be removed and placed in different locations, and there are roofs to be used for practice when that is the only point of entry.
These differences will make a better firefighter, fire chiefs said on Tuesday morning. Not that the current firefighters are not excellent — they are, the chiefs said — but active training like this is a benefit to everyone.
"We employ students that come out of this fire academy. Here, they'll get the essential training that they need for their firefighter skills," said Mark Becraft, the North Davis Fire Department fire chief. "And my department ... we are able to use this and increase the effectiveness of how we train our firefighters, too."
