Thorold firefighters were back in school Saturday for a refresher course on water and ice rescue procedures.
The session was presented by Fire Prevention Officer (FPO) Vince Giovannini and Mark Todorov, water/ice rescue lead.
Giovannini explained the program to ThoroldNews in an interview.
“We have a full time training officer, Mike Pittaway, but we assign Todorov to oversee training of the instructors,” he said.
All those taking the course Saturday are trainers themselves. Once they complete the refresher course it will be their combined duty to train all firefighters in Thorold.
“This training is available to all and any firefighter to Thorold fire and emergency services,” said the FPO.
“There’s no provincial certification program for water or ice rescue so we take industry standards and the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) standards specifically to water and ice rescue and created our own program in-house. We’ve taken all that, the Ontario fire college course, all of our neighbouring municipality programs, and created our own program, explained Giovannini.
He added that the program was created out of necessity, from a city hall directive.
“What we’re doing isn’t necessarily what we want to do. Council sets the level of service. Council has adopted the established regulating bylaw so our core services are adopted by them. They want us to do this type of rescue operation, so the ongoing training is necessary. In order to fulfill the level of service, the training has to be there,” he said.
Brad Jamison, one of the instructors in the classroom, explained the next step in the program.
“We all became instructors two years ago; this is a refresher course. We’ll teach the rest of the firefighters throughout the department next month. Every year new training comes out, so we do a refresher course every year,” he said.
Both firefighters noted that the outdoor ice rescue training for the rest of the department will take place in February.
Jamison, who became certified as an instructor two years ago, said that there are between two and seven firefighters assigned to each trainer.
