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4-alarm scholastic training

October 04, 2011|By Mike Moore | mmoore@jessaminejournal.com

Photo by Mike Moore/mmoore@jessaminejournal.com

The heat was on last Friday as 27 Jessamine Career and Technology Center students were thrown into the fire at the Hal Rogers Regional Fire Training Center in Somerset.

The field trip was part of a public-safety careers class, Nicholasville Battalion Chief David Johns said.

“What that class is about is it introduces high-schoolers to the various first-responder jobs: fire, police and EMS,” he said. “So they can see that there are a lot of options that they do have coming out of high school.”

Johns said the course gives students an overview of the different aspects of each area of public safety including firefighting.

“They’re learning about fire behavior, the basics of firefighting and some hands-on stuff,” Johns said. “We’ve showed them how to put on the air packs and the gear, and we’ve taught them about fire behavior, and we’ve talked about the different ranks: lieutenant, captain, fire inspectors, code enforcement as it relates to the fire department and state and local instructors. We’re trying to give them the greatest exposure that they can have in the world of firefighting.”

Students McKennzie Via and Jesse Gichuru said they gained greater insight into what firefighters go through with Friday’s trip.

“I learned how fire flows over you and how it hits the ceiling and spreads out,” Gichuru said.

Via said the smoke-filled-room demonstration was another aspect of Friday that was memorable.

“I did not expect that (thickness of smoke) at all; there was a lot of smoke in there,” she said. “I couldn’t see my hands from this distance (about 2 feet).”

The regional fire training center is state-of-the-art, Johns said, adding that it gave the students a safe environment in which to learn.

“This is a propane and theatrical smoke-controlled fire environment,” Johns said. “And in this 1,000 square feet of training space, we can do any kind of training that we would want to do.

“Today, we’re giving the students a really good picture of how a fire develops, how hot it can get, what kind of smoke it puts off and what the environment looks like when there is a fire,” Johns added.

The battalion chief said the fire department is hoping to find future firefighters.

“We’re trying to make it sort of a mini fire academy so that we can have some local folks who may become interested in becoming firefighters and might stay with us their whole career,” Johns said.

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