High Value Training ?

I posted this in the training fourm, but thought it might make sense here. Any feedback on courses you've brought in to your departments would be appreciated.

We are a paid-per-call department who services a rural area near a large Canadian city (Calgary). We do 70% MVA calls, 25% grass fires, and 5% structure calls(4 or 5 per year).

We've just been given a donation of ~$5000 for training. This money is over and obove our regular training budget.
Can any of you offer a reccomendation for a course/instructor we could bring in which would offer something more than the typcial scba don/doff, lift, carries, hose lays, etc.

I'm thinking something along the lines of either a hazmat awareness course, a wildland fire course, or some specialized rescue training.

We have a classroom facility, and training grounds on which to host the course.

Thanks.

Randy Adams

One of the best courses that our department invested in was the Fire Attack Series put out by Emergency Responce. Very good course from size up to overhaul, excellent to teach to rookies after they have completed their intial training.

Thanks.

I will check it out.

One of the best trainers i have trained with is Trans Care Rescue out of Saskatchewan. They provide top notch training in firefighting, hazmat, high angle rescue, jaws etc.

I'll second that, Bill McCombs does a great job and has been doing it for years.
Contact: trans.care@sasktel.net Ph.(306)283-4496

Randy Schmitz
Calgary Fire Dept

Donations are great. It's always a tough choice. On the one hand, your call volume on MVAs looks like an extrication, and hazmat training would be good, but same as us, (luckily) you don't get enough structures to really get good at them, so maybe fire attack.
With 5000, maybe you can get a variety of coarses.

FireDog7 put me onto a guy on Calgary FD who does training 'on the side'

I think we are going to do a hazmat awareness level course, and with the rest of the funds buy some training aids (ie an LCD projector and maybe a Rescue Randy)

Just a thought Rural but being in Strathmore have you done any training in grain elevator fires? We got a video from Pioneer I believe that went over construction and attack procedures. Just thinking out loud here. You may want to try the Pioneer elevator in Carseland as one of the employees there used to be on my old department.

Not many of the wooden one's left around here... I think they've taken to pushing them down in favor of the high capacity concrete grain handling facilities.

The ones that are around appear to poorly maintained (from the outside at least).

Should we (or our neighbours) actually have one burn, water supply is going to be our biggest challenge. I'm going to try to organize a water shuttle drill this summer with our mutual aid partners.

We've got a few Agricultural Production Engineer's (farmer's) on our department. I'll mention the video to them to see if they can get a copy when next they haul grain.

Thanks for the head's up.