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Oct. 22--AZTEC -- The gear, the smells and especially the heat.
Several San Juan County government employees took part in an open house at the San Juan County Fire Department on Friday afternoon.
The officials practiced dressing for a fire, holding and spraying the powerful hose, and search and rescue techniques. The afternoon ended by crawling through a smoky controlled burning room with fire protective clothes and bottled oxygen and observing common techniques firefighters use.
"Everybody knows that firefighters fight fires, but not everybody knows how they fight fires," said Doug Hatfield, the chief of the San Juan County Fire Department.
It was the first time the fire department hosted an event that gave county officials a taste of what a fire fighter's job is like. Hatfield said there would be similar events in the future.
Scott Eckstein, a county commissioner, Larry Hathaway, the general services administrator, Mike Stark, the county operations officer and Vance McCullough, a lieutenant at the San Juan Adult Detention Center, participated in the drills, along with this reporter.
The drills were at a building on Oliver Street formerly owned by the Pepsi Corporation. The county purchased the building for the fire department to train.
The participants lined up in a circle and learned how to dress for a fire in about a minute, organized two-man hose teams and sprayed down a truck, crawled through a dark room looking for a victim and learned how to use the oxygen tanks before getting up close with a live flame.
The San Juan County Fire Department is primarily composed of volunteers. There are about 250 of them, and they respond to an average of about 7,500 emergency calls per year throughout the county, Hatfield said.
A volunteer firefighter in San Juan County works about eight hours per week on average, he said.
The calls widely vary in nature. A call can take a volunteer to a structure fire that requires a search and rescue operation and hours of firefighting, or a call can be from an old lady with a broken catheter. The latter call happened a few days ago, Hatfield said.
For each call a volunteer responds to, he or she gets $10.
"I think there's a lot more stress on a volunteer firefighter than a career firefighter," Hatfield said, adding that three-fourths of the country's firefighters are volunteers. "In addition to their work as a firefighter, they have to deal with stress from their home and employer."
The fire department captains and chief and deputy chief organized the drills. The county officials did well, even volunteers in training sometimes panic when they go into a room with a live fire wearing an claustrophobic oxygen mask for the first time, said Craig Daugherty, the deputy chief.
After the open house was over, an ash-covered Hathaway had one thing to say about the volunteers: "I think they definitely earn their $10."
