What does it take to make the grade in the Burnaby Fire Department? Burnaby NOW reporter Cayley Dobie sat down with two Burnaby training officers, two of the department’s 2014 recruits and the director of the fire and safety division at the Justice Institute of B.C. to find out what all the fuss was about the Burnaby Fire Department. In this, the final instalment of her series, she talks with Peter Grootendorst of the Justice Institute of B.C.
*
For three decades, the new director of the fire and safety division at the Justice Institute of B.C. battled all types of blazes in Maple Ridge.
Today, Peter Grootendorst uses his 30 years of experience to train future fire recruits across the Lower Mainland and province.
As director of fire and safety at the Justice Institute, Grootendorst, former chief of the Maple Ridge Fire Department, oversees a number of programs aimed at educating new recruits about firefighting. Among the programs offered, there is a 12-week pre-employment program that teaches firefighting hopefuls all the basic skills they’ll need in anticipation of being hired by a department.
While a pre-employment fire program isn’t a prerequisite for applicants to the Burnaby Fire Department, Grootendorst (and training officers in Burnaby) noted that most applicants do enroll in some kind of fire school prior to applying to various departments. Next fall, the Justice Institute is offering a modified pre-employment program that has only seven weeks of on-campus training. By shortening the length of time people need to spend on campus and by offering more online components for the theory portion of the program, the institute is attempting to accommodate more people, Grootendorst said.
This change, however, won’t affect fire departments that take advantage of the training programs and facilities offered at the Maple Ridge campus. Burnaby fire recruits spend three days at the facility, putting into practice all the skills they’ve learned during nine weeks of training.
The Burnaby NOW caught up with Grootendorst to talk about the changing ways of firefighting and what the Maple Ridge vet thinks of the Burnaby Fire Department.
Cayley Dobie: How has firefighter training changed over the years?
Peter Grootendorst:What we’re finding is that, through prevention, fire departments have done a great job of educating people so that they’re more safe and the buildings are built to a higher standard with smoke alarms and sprinkler systems, which have done a huge job to reduce the number of fires. But when the fires do occur, the fires are usually quicker burning and they’re hotter and they’re more dangerous for the firefighter, so they certainly need different skills than they did before.
CD: What type of skills?
PG:They (firefighters) have to be very quick in arriving on scene and very quick in deploying their equipment, so they have to be very skilled at laying the hose out and moving the hose up stairwells in apartments. They have to be very skilled in their techniques. But we’re also introducing new technology like thermal imaging cameras, which will allow us to find the seed of the fire quicker and it also allows us to search for victims. Things like reading the smoke, where you can look at the colour of the smoke, the density of the smoke, whether the smoke is lazy or whether the smoke is under pressure. Now when we’re looking at things,we’re becoming scientific, more analytical in our studying of the fires, so it’s interesting how the fire service has changed.
CD: Can you elaborate on what you mean by analytical?
PG: The colour of the flame can be an indicator because if the colour of the flame is green or blue or unusual colour, then it’d lead you to believe that there’s chemicals burning, not just normal wood. Sometimes you can pull up on scene and there can be a smell, like a very acrid smell or a chemical smell, so if you catch a whiff of that that can tell you, and of course, if you look at the building and it’s very secure, that can lead you to believe that something’s going on.
The other thing is what we teach them is once they go in to start looking. If you go into a kitchen and a house and you see a bunch of glass flasks and it looks like a laboratory, then yout mind should be going, ‘This isn’t a regular kitchen, there’s something weird here,’ and that’s why we train them to be again analytical and don’t just charge in like a bull – you’re going in, you’re looking, you’re observing and you’re thinking all the time, ‘Is there something out of the ordinary or does something not look right?’
CD: How do you train the recruits for these circumstances?
PG: Nowadays we do what’s called a 360, so before you enter the structure, you want to run around or go around all sides of the buildings so you get a good visual of what’s going on in the building, trying to look at the building. A good fire officer will be able to look at the building from the outside and be able to determine what the floor plan is, where what kind of rooms are, and get kind of an idea of hallways. They have to know a lot about building construction, so it’s getting more and more technical all the time. You don’t just pull up on scene and pull out a hose and kick the door and go inside – it’s way more involved all the time.
CD: What role does the JIBC play in Burnaby recruit training?
PG: One of the things we offer Burnaby, and we offer all the fire departments, is the ability to come out to our Maple Ridge campus and do live fire training. So it’s something you just can’t do in your backyard. We have a very extensive, what we call, burn building. It’s a three-storey concrete structure and we can simulate all kinds of fires. We can simulate apartment fires, we can simulate house fires, we can simulate basement fires, so it’s really a good opportunity for the recruits to experience the heat and the flames and the smoke and the zero visibility so it gives it a real hands-on, something that until you experience it you just can’t recreate it by watching a video or doing something like that.
CD: Is there anything unique in the way Burnaby trains its recruits?
PG: One of the things that I think is very innovative and creative is that they bring their own fire trucks out with their own equipment and apparatus. We have, of course, fire trucks and equipment out there but it’s just so much better when the recruits and the officers are using their own stuff and their own equipment. It’s as close as you’ll ever come to fighting a real house fire and they’re using their own equipment. It is real fire, it’s not simulated fire, real smoke, real heat, and it’s just an experience they’ll never be able to get other than going to a real emergency.
CD: What do you think of Burnaby’s training program?
PG: They have a very creative program and I compliment them for it. What they do is they take their junior officers, so the people that are moving into an officers’ role, and they pair them up leading the recruits during the training. … It gives the officers a good opportunity to demonstrate their skills and hone their skills as team leaders and in addition to that, it gives the recruits the opportunity to go in and actually experience the fire and demonstrate their skills in pulling hose and putting up ladders.
