Facing the Heat: Region‘s Firefighters Train for the Worst

March 9, 2005

“Every year, more than 100 firefighters die in this country -- not all of them in structure fires, but quite a few.”
Speaking is Captain Ron Taylor of the Grand Traverse Metro and Rural Fire Department Safety and Survival program. His course teaches firefighters all over Northern Michigan how to survive disasters in burning buildings.
And there are plenty of grim reminders that this training is a matter of life and death.
“In Summit Township south of Jackson this winter, a firefighter ran out of air on the lower level of a building and got disoriented and died right there,” Capt. Taylor says.
On another occasion a female firefighter in Lansing fell through a floor and although she was saved by a firefighter holding onto her, she suffered second and third degree burns. In another incident, six firefighters in Worcester, Mass., were trapped in a blazing cold storage building and lost their lives while searching for occupants.
Firefighting is one of the most dangerous careers in the world, even in Northern Michigan. “We’ve had some close calls here,” Taylor says. “I’ve fallen through a floor into a basement before myself and a couple of people have been trapped in burning buildings, but they’ve always been able to get themselves out.”
A 10-year fire fighting veteran who also serves as a fire inspector, Taylor is one of four instructors who have offered “Get Out Alive” training to 120 firefighters in the region since the course was launched in June 2003. He hopes to get every firefighter in Northern Michigan trained for safety, including both career and volunteer departments.
The training includes leaping head-first out a four-story building at the end of a rope in full gear to evade flash fires.
“It’s not a normal human action to jump out a window head-first, so what we’re trying to do is get people over their phobias,” he says. “These are extreme situations where the heat flashes from 400-500 degrees to 1,200-1,500 degrees instantaneously. Firefighters can literally cook in their suits and you have to be able to jump out of the building head-first because your partners are going to be right behind you.”
Other instruction involves how to respond if a floor collapses and how to bail out of a three-story window by ladder.
The program yields results. Capt. Taylor notes that in a recent fire which took the life of a 14-year-old girl in Cadillac, one of the firefighters had to use a maneuver he’d used in the course to save his own life. “He ran out of air and had to bail out of a window,” he says. “He wrote us a letter thanking us that he didn’t get injured or killed.”

Terri McCarthy is a freelance photographer and police officer’s wife who spent the day photographing a recent safety course.