The second day of Firehouse World in San Diego included hands-on training and in-depth classroom sessions.
During pre-conference classes on Monday, attendees chose from a number of eight-hour classes
Robert Molinaro, a captain with the City of Rockland, Calif., was sitting in on David McGrail’s “High-Rise Firefighting Operations - Simplifying the Complicated” session.
“I am involved with the high-rise training up in the Sacramento area and I’ve learned some new things about how the command structure is set up,” Molinaro said. “Some of the procedures and tactics are different than our procedures and I will bring back some of the good things from this class to my area.”
Los Angeles County Capt. Rodert Rodriguez said: “I’ll be conducting a high-rise drill in two weeks so I just wanted to get some better knowledge for the crews I’m training that day.”
He said that the class opened new doors for resource utilization and some of the tactics discussed in the class are different.
Assistant Chief Dave Franklin from the San Francisco was a co-presenter for the “Command and Tactical Strategy,” an eight-hour pre-conference class.
“We put them in the seat to make the calls using videos and pictures and then we, as a, group the discuss their tactics used in the scenarios,” Franklin said. “Any time we bring in different groups, you bring the different things they do...we’re all doing the same thing, but we may call it something different or use different people for those roles.”
The students went over scenarios for dwelling fires and commercial structures.
“The one thing we stressed with the group is the fundamentals. Don’t forget the fundamentals because if you forget those, everything will start going bad at the scene.”
On Tuesday, Robert Cobb, of the National Director of Community Hazard Mitigation, will do his first presentation on the Insurance Service Organizations’ updated Fire Suppression Rating System.
“It is the bible that the field reps use to grade fire protection in their communities.”
“For the first time in a public forum, I will go into great detail for all of the fire suppression into the changes for the rating system,” Cobb said. “Starting with the fact that we’re looking to reference the NFPA standards instead of the ISO standards to make it easier for chiefs.”
He will do a side-by-side comparison of the old and new schedules and provide an overview of the new point system.
As hands-on classes wrapped up, students at the IAFF Fireground Survival program learned about self-rescue and self-survival techniques.
