Firefighters with the Perry Volunteer Fire Department took some outdoor training Saturday morning in the mild spring sunshine.
“Primarily, we do our training on a Tuesday evening during the month,” Perry Volunteer Fire Department Chief Chris Hinds said, “but we decided to start trying one Saturday a month for training from 8 a.m. until noon. It’s getting warm enough to the point that we can get out of the classroom, so to speak, out of the inside of the station and do some hands-on training.”
The exercises were conducted on 28th Street north of Willis Avenue.
“It’s a good place for us to go train,” Hinds said, “because it’s not real high traffic area, and we’ve got three or four hydrants right in a row there that we can work off of and have a good water supply.”
One of the day’s lessons was in operating the pumper truck, a skill every firefighter needs to know in its rudiments.
“That’s probably the most important job at a fire scene is to get water out of the truck,” Hinds said. “If you can’t get water out of the truck, it’s like showing up to a gunfight emptyhanded. So it’s important that everybody know how to pump the truck just in case, since we’re a volunteer department, and that way everybody can at least get water out of the truck and start fighting the fire until we get someone there who’s more qualified.”
Certified pump operators, such as Perry firefighter Rodney Cromwell, are well trained in the technical skill, Hinds said, but it is “also a good idea for all the firefighters to know how the trucks operate and where the water comes from and how they get the pressure they get, so once or twice a year we make everybody go through the pump operations.”
The training session also involved several operations using the ladder truck, he said, including running the nozzle off the end of the ladder from a different truck and then running it off the ladder truck itself and also performing pumping operations with the ladder truck.
Pumping from the hydrants was also practiced, and a portable tank was set up to simulate a rural fire.
“We filled the tank with water,” Hinds said, “and the guys practiced drafting off of that, sucking the water out of the tank with a pump to simulate a rural fire where we don’t have a hydrant.”
Future training sessions will involve topics such as ladder practice, Hinds said.
“Some people might wonder, ‘What’s the big deal about carrying and putting up a ladder?'” he said, “but when you’re dealing with a 35-foot extension ladder that weighs a couple hundred pounds, it’s not something you just grab and throw around. And with a ladder that size, you have to put it up in a certain way so you don’t injure yourself and you don’t get tangled up in the power lines and so on. So next time it might be ladders.”
Proficiency in using air packs and dealing with interior attacks are also on the agenda.
The roster of the Perry Volunteer Fire Department currently has about 40 members. The department was very active in the first months of 2018, fighting downtown fires at the Perry Floral store and in an upper-story apartment at 1306 Second St. and house fires on Willis Avenue near downtown and on Fifth Street near St. Patrick School.
