Breathing Apparatus (BA) training - part two

January 27^th 2018 – diary entry.

‘Bill picked me up. A day of highs and lows. I messed up a lot today and I’m so annoyed with myself.’

You’ve seen this journey expand if you’ve read the other blogs. BA School is tough; it has to be tough to prepare you for what is to come. The time to mess up is in training, but you have to learn from it, and fast, any continued mistakes mean you fail, and failure is not an option to me, all through my life I have strived to be the best that I can be.

So we are back at Exeter BA School for day 6 of 10. We had a lot more BA wears, more servicing of sets, more experience of fire behaviour and environment and I didn’t have the best of days.

Following a search, I missed the stairs, a ridiculous rookie mistake, but one that haunted me all week. I then had issues with radios, another issue that would haunt me all week, mainly because of the general mickey-taking that some of the guys gave me. Don’t worry, it was all done in jest, and I got my own back eventually!

Back home that evening I tried to relax, I went over my notes, went over the mistakes I had made in my head, mentally beat myself up a bit and decided that tomorrow was a new day and tried to move on. 

Day 7 and it was a better day for me.

I can’t tell you a lot about what we did that day, as it would spoil it for those of you going through the process of being an On Call Firefighter, but we did an amazing exercise, I was the BAECO (Breathing Apparatus Entry Control Officer) and I really like doing that, recording and keeping a check on information. My radio skills picked up again that day and as a team, we all did really well.

A very different finish and feeling to the day than the previous.

Day 8, we did an exercise in the Cold Villa, and also learnt all about Positive Pressure Ventilation (PPV) which as really interesting. It has many uses, but can ease working conditions for Firefighters, give better visibility, safety and comfort.

We learnt Firefighting branch techniques, had lots of practise with them before going into the Attack 2 container. This was the last thing we did that day, and we over-ran slightly, which meant when I got back to Totnes I had to go straight to the sports centre to take my Insanity class. All we could smell for the 50 minute session was smoke, as I sweated it out into the room! Luckily they all found it funny! That’s the thing about being an On Call Firefighter, sometimes our ‘Day jobs’ are affected by what we do, always allow enough time for a shower!

Day 9, and they are ramping up the work more and more, giving us more kit, more work, harder targets to achieve and we did a great exercise in steam. I was feeling confident, we all did some great work and we finished the day with the Attack 3 container. All preparations for tomorrow and the big assessment.

The big day!

We had our written exam in the morning, seemed to go okay, lunch and then our practical assessment.

I got to do my assessment with Joey (Tavistock) and it was tough. We ended up putting the same fire out three times, we would shut the door after painting it down, the assessors would open the door again and send us back to it.

Joey was awesome, I was less awesome, I made a few minor errors that were explained to me afterwards, but we passed, all of us passed, both written and practical. We were on the run properly, time to remove the red diamonds from our helmets and be an active part of the crew. Another part of the journey had begun.