Essentials, 3rd Night (and a semi-call)

Last night's class covered PPE (personal protective equipment, aka "turnout gear"), starting off with a bit of lecture, then getting practical. We brought our gear with us, and got a chance both to perform a gear inspection and go through donning our full gear.

The requirement is to be able to don full gear in less than 1 minute. On calls, I've been pretty sure I've met that, but in class realized that I wasn't putting everything on. I haven't been wearing both my hood and my turnout gloves, which is fine for now as I'm not doing any interior work. Plus, on real calls, you're pretty interested in getting on the apparatus, and gloves and hood can go on once you're loaded up.

Anyway, in class, I missed the 60-second requirement the first time, but got it on the 2nd. You do get to have your gear laid out however will be most efficient, and the 2nd time around, I did a better job of preparing before the clock started.

After donning our gear, we got to board the engine and get strapped in. Folks were joking about why they put seatbelts in apparatus, but the official position is: wear them. In fact, there's a seatbelt poster hanging at our station showing an engine that wrecked and rolled over, and the FFs on board had their seatbelts on. So next time I'm in the station, gotta find where the belts are on Squad.

Then, about 15 minutes before the end of class, our pagers went off. I'd thought we were too far from the station for us to bother responding, but the folks I was with grabbed their gear and ran, so I did too. Usually that wouldn't have been a problem, except I needed to leave right after class to go pick my family up from the airport, so I got a bit uptight. Making it worse was the fact that we didn't go back to the station, (where I could have opted out, got in my car, and headed on), but we drove straight to the call. Fortunately (for the homeowner and for me), we got released shortly after arriving (it was something at a nearby trailer park; we were mutual aid, and weren't needed), and I got to the airport in plenty of time to get my fam back.