Drills

Ah, drill night. What is the biggest problem with drill nights? Figuring out what night your members are able and willing to come to the firehouse to play firefighter.

Why is that a problem? I guess because we really don't do very much at most of our drill nights. It's hard to come up with ideas every week for an hour or two of training and practice. And whatever you do, you would like to think that the time spent will be valuable to everyone. But if you don't keep it interesting, the number of members showing up for drill night will start to plummet.

Here are a few ideas you can use to plan and prepare for drill nights. Whether you do it monthly or weekly, some of the more important things to remember are that the simple things, when forgotten at an incident, potentially have a huge negative effect on the outcome of the incident. Pulling hose, placing ladders, opening a nozzle -- it all sounds so simple but if we don't practice them once in a while, you will find that those skills will sink to a level that even a novice might perform better than everyone else.

We changed our annual refresher training to comply with changes promulgated by the Department of Labor after various agencies and associations met to discuss needed changes. The initial training provided by the Office of Fire Prevention and Control also changed starting in 2016 to align the training with the Recommended Best Practices. We also changed our annual training to align with the Department of Labor's Firefighter Annual Refresher Training Guidance document. These documents, shown below, will be very useful to follow as a set of guidelines for our officers when training our members.

Letter from Director Eileen Franko.pdf

Letter from Eileen Franko

Recommended Best Practices for FD Training Programs.pdf

Best Practices Guidelines

FF Annual Refresher Training Guidance.pdf

Annual Refresher Guidelines

Subject matter for drills

Hoseline and nozzle drills
High-rise packs and standpipe usage
Water supply drills
Ground ladder placement drills
Fire safety drills with local residents and businesses and;
Fire pre-planning drills
Smoke reading drills
Sprinkler system drills
Safe driving drills
Tools and equipment drills
Mode of operation drills (offensive, defensive or combination)
Cold weather operations
Fire behaviour drills
Haz-Mat drills (DOT Guidebook practice)
Fire extinguisher talk
Foam operations
Response to natural gas emergencies
Cause and origin talk

There are many others but if you have new ideas, by all means I will post it here for everyone to use. There are also some guides that would be helpful for each of these subjects.

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