Fire rescue is a dangerous job, it entails hours of training and retraining to combat claustrophobia, exercises to control breathing in intense situations and extreme preparedness to enter the most dangerous of situations at a moment’s notice.
On May 2, members of Cochrane Fire Services took part in a confidence maze, “fire ground survival training,” at the Calgary Fire Services training facility in northeast Calgary.
Firefighters donned a full blacked-out oxygen mask, making it impossible to see any obstacle in their way. They then made their way through an abandoned house, a maze of hallways, tight spaces and holes in walls, all while wearing their full gear and a standard oxygen tank with a maximum of 45 minutes of air (standing still), which usually runs dry in 20 minutes under the normal extremes of a fire rescue.
“What we’re doing is taking all the tools and skills they’ve learned and the apparatuses they’ve been trained on at the hall and put them into one big scenario,” said Cochrane Fire captain Grant MacKinnon.
This is a simulation of a building evacuation during a fire rescue, and MacKinnon said that while it’s a routine training exercise, the panic of an evacuation is real, as oxygen levels start to dwindle and energy is exhausted trying to navigate through a building and small holes in walls while essentially blind.
“The benefits of this training is that, while we’re always trained to get into buildings and how to do that, it’s equally important to know how to get yourself out safely,” MacKinnon said.
No matter how big the person compared to how small the hole in a wall is, firefighters are trained that there is no scenario they cannot overcome if they have the right training and techniques.
“‘Can’t’ isn’t a word we use, this is life or death, this is about survival,” said MacKinnon.
