It’s November 6, at about 7:30 p.m. A man, presumably a pyromaniac, has just tossed a lit flare into a van stuffed with wood and hay drenched in kerosene in a field near Bon Accord. Flame lights up the night. A tower of smoke billows before a crescent moon.
Sturgeon County’s newest firefighters spring into action. “Get your lines up and go get ’em!” shouts fire chief Pat Mahoney. “Go, go, go!”
The firefighters let loose, sending up steam and spray as they blast the fire with high-pressure hoses. The fire is out within minutes.
Not bad, considering they’re not even in high school.
Six junior-high school students stomped out fires last week as part of a skills demonstration by the county’s new Fire Cadet Training Program. The students, the first ever to complete the seven-week course, showed about 20 onlookers at the Sturgeon County emergency services training grounds south of Bon Accord how to put out gas fires using extinguishers and free a victim from a car using the Jaws of Life.
Mahoney said he was very proud of how far the students had come. “Some of them handle (the equipment) better than some of the actual firefighters we have.”
The course is a joint initiative of the Sturgeon County, Bon Accord and Gibbons fire departments, Mahoney said, and launched earlier this fall. It’s similar to the existing apprenticeship program that offers high-school students credit for firefighting.
“I started firefighting when I was 14,” Mahoney said, and he wanted to get more people interested in the job. His hope was that exposing students to the job early in life would make them more likely to step up as volunteers when they turned 16 (the minimum age at which you can be a firefighter in Alberta).
The students spent three hours a week learning how to wrangle hoses, use extinguishers, search smoke-filled rooms and dismantle wrecked cars, Mahoney said – the same training real firefighters undergo when they join a fire department.
The cadets regularly had to lug around 15 to 30 pounds of equipment – an impressive feat for cadet Reece Chorney, considering he’s just 13 years old.
“You’re not very flexible with it on,” said the Morinville resident, and the fire’s really hot. “Even with the firefighting gear on, you can still feel it.”
Kaylin Charbonneau, 14, said she got an adrenaline rush when she got to extinguish a large gas fire during last week’s demonstration – one that roared back to life on her when she missed part of it. “I screamed,” she admits.
The course helped her lose her fear of fire, she said. “I thought it was going to burn my face off, and it didn’t.”
Linden Ozirney, 15, said the toughest part of the course was search-and-rescue, where they had to find a dummy in a smoke-filled room. “We went past it a couple of times because it’s pitch-black in there,” he said, and he mistook the dummy for a couch at one point. “We got him out just in the nick of time.”
It was pretty cool to see a room fill top to bottom with smoke in just three minutes, Chorney said, and to extinguish an inferno at point-blank range. “It’s actually not that hard,” he said. “The key basically is to stay calm … just breathe in and breathe out.”
Mahoney hoped the students learned discipline and some practical skills from the course. “Whether it’s learning how to operate a chainsaw or climb a ladder, these are skills they’ll use for the rest of their lives.”
Staffers were now reviewing the course and hoped to run it again next year.
Charbonneau said she planned to use this training to become a paramedic. “I think it’d be kind of cool for more girls to do it,” she said (she was the only one in this year’s class). “It’s not just a man thing. Girls can do it too.”
Ozirney said he planned to become a volunteer firefighter in Gibbons next year, and recommended the cadet program to others. “It’s a fun experience, and you learn a lot about it.”
