Lots of lessons learned this week!! One thing to know is that you have to be good with confined spaces and crawling around to be a firefighter! I told you all about the maze this week already and how it was fun but scary at the same time. I don't think I really told you a whole lot about our SCBA. This is our breathing apparatus and is made up of a harness and a cylinder with a regulator that hooks into your face piece. On Thursday, they threw a fun little drill in where we had wax paper in our face pieces as a blindfold. We had to crawl through a tube and then they led us to a SCBA that we had to put together, turn on, put on our backs, hook up to air and then crawl to the pass device. The pass device produces a ringing when a firefighter is immobile for 30 secs, is mounted on the SCBA and can help you locate an injured firefighter. The hardest part was doing this while wearing our firefighter gloves!
Friday they took this drill one step farther and we had to switch packs while in the maze. This time the pack was all put together but we had to take ours off and put the new one on while still hooked up to the air in the first one. Once you had all the straps connected and turned on the air, you had to take in a deep breath and then unhook the old regulator and hook up the new one while holding your breath. It really only takes a second or so to do this but it can be scary if you over think. So that was our fun challenge for the week. If you have ever been backpacking, the SCBA feels similar to the weight and size of a pack with all the straps and such.
In addition to the maze, we learned about search and rescue this week. This is where checking your batteries comes in to play. I found that it is not easy to search a smoke filled house in the dark for surviving victims. The concept seems easy but have you ever blind folded yourself and tried to crawl through your house with your 50 pound monkey on your back making sure to stay oriented while searching every square foot? Not so easy!! So my challenge to you is check the batteries in your smoke detector so that you will never have the experience. I can only imagine a bunch of firefighters coming through your home in the middle of the night breathing through air packs would make the situation that much scarier! Not to mention there was no heat during this drill just smoke machines!
If you are reading this right now, it probably means that you are a special person in my life and you care about me and how school is going. This means I probably care about you too, so I challenge each of you right now to get up from in front of your computer at this very moment and go check your smoke detectors. :) <3
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