Difference Between Fire Fighting Training Based on City Size and Location

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Difference between Fire Fighting Training Based on City size and Location

Fire fighting is the act of suppressing and extinguishing fires to protect lives and prevent environmental and property destructions. Fire fighting training involves extensive training in combating, preventing fires, answering emergency calls, maintaining and operating fire department equipment’s.  Fire fighting training is aimed at acquiring knowledge of department organizations, procedures and operations and town or city street systems. There are several differences between fire fighting training in large, medium and small cities.

Firstly, the recruitment stage; for a large city the requirements are extremely stringent because of the difficulties in  combating fires and rescuing lives in small and compact spaces with so many tall buildings. The streets of large cities are always congested (with traffic) and this requires an accurate street system analysis in order to reach the fire site and be able to suppress and extinguish the fire. For medium and small cities the working spaces and the street system are not extremely congested and thus the requirements may be a bit lower than for big cities. These requirements include; age, though age limit is generally set at between 18 years to 29 years, big cities prefer ages between 17 years by the end of the application period and less than 29 years by the beginning of the application process while medium and small cities may allow up to 30 years.  The other is education level, the minimum education level required by medium and small cities is high school diploma or its equivalent, but for big cities the department always favours individuals who have earned Associate of Science in Fire science.[pic 1]

Secondly, actual training; for big cities the training takes approximately four  months ( 40 – 50 hours per week) of combined classroom and practical instructions (Delmar). While for medium and small cities the training may last for six weeks. The trainees learn how to handle fire equipment’s, search and rescue procedures, building codes and fire science in general. In large cities training is almost continuous as the fire department is required to perform at least a fire fighting drill on weekly basis. These requirements vary from one city to the other based on the level of fire hazards in the city.

Also, large cities have sub-departments within the fire department. This means that the training is subdivided into different sections. There are those trainees who learn specifically communication support or other areas such as confined space rescue, decontamination, detection and suppression systems. Medium cities may also have specialization in fire fighting training but in most cases medium and small cities have the fire training as a full package. In such cases the trainees do not need to specialize in a number of rescue operations but all possible disaster.