For the last 9 months I have been sitting through the Firefighter 1 course. This is a 160 hour qualification designed to give Firefighters an entry level qualification that is accepted nationally (mostly). It's a real bugger. It may not seem like it, but that's a lot of time, especially when you've been out of the studying mode for a while (Depressingly it has now been 18 years since I last attended a place of higher learning). We have homework assignments, tests, reading and all of that jazz. Once in a while we even get to play with hoses, ladders and stuff. Not much fire, though.
I'm sure that most people would assume that Firefighters get trained to put out fire by, well, putting out fire. Not so ! In today's environmentally friendly world, it's increasingly hard to get State and Local Government to allow you to burn anything (that is, of course, unless your a homeowner in which case you can burn pretty any old hazardous crap you want). In 9 months, we have one day of 'live fire' training at the State Academy. Luckily, we also have a few real fires back in our own department to cut our teeth on.
I'm just glad it's over and I can get my Thursdays back. Thank God for TiVo, or else I'd have missed an entire season of CSI.
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