West Perth and Perth East firefighters have recently begun training with two new pieces of equipment — a forced-entry door prop and a K12 cutting simulator — that were purchased with provincial-grant funding last fall.
Two new pieces of training equipment recently purchased with provincial grant funding by the West Perth and Perth East fire departments are literally opening doors for local firefighters.
Last fall, the two local fire departments jointly purchased both a forced-entry door training prop and a K12 cutting simulator through roughly $15,000 in fire safety-training grant funding from the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General and the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal.
“West Perth received a grant of $6,700 and Perth East received a grant of $8,000, so almost $15,000 between both municipalities,” said Bill Hunter, the departments’ joint fire chief. “It gave us the opportunity to purchase some training material that we otherwise didn’t budget for. Obviously, the big-ticket item, the one everyone likes most, is the forcible-entry door simulator.”
Designed and built by H&R Machine in Fergus, the forced-entry door training prop simulates nearly every scenario firefighters may need to overcome when they encounter locked doors during a fire – from outward and inward swinging doors to having to breach a door from the confines of narrow halls and stairways.
“When we show up at a house, a warehouse, a factory, whatever, and come across locked doors and there’s a fire or someone’s in trouble inside the building, we need to quickly be able to force our way through the door to get in ,” Hunter said. “If there’s an easier way, we would certainly try that, but having the skill to quickly open a door is very important for us to have.
“So with that piece of equipment, we use wood to simulate the door being locked and the number of pieces of wood that we use (to brace the door) allows us to simulate everything from a simple house door all the way up to a reinforced door at maybe an industrial facility.”
The prop also offers firefighters the opportunity to learn how to remove door hinges and doorknobs when the situation demands. While H&R Machine temporarily loaned the stairway attachment to the fire departments, Hunter said fire staff will take measurements and build their own attachment in near the future.
Hunter said the manufacturer conducted training with the departments’ firefighters on this prop at the Milverton fire station last fall and, since then, it has been rotated through several other fire stations in both municipalities. Currently, the prop is at the Mitchell fire station where it will stay for six months to allow West Perth firefighters to train before being moved to one of the fire stations in Perth East. where it will stay for another six months.
“It’ll spend six months of the year in West Perth and six months of the year in Perth East,” Hunter said. “That’s kind of the whole thing with our shared-services agreement. We share staff, so why not share resources that neither one of us, through this grant, would have the ability to buy on our own?”
These pieces of equipment, along with the departments’ other training equipment, allow volunteer firefighters to complete mandatory training in house instead of driving hours away to complete that training off site. Hunter said keep the firefighters close so they can respond to calls while preventing these volunteers from needing to book time off from their day jobs for training.
In his 15 years with the local fire departments, Hunter said this is the first provincial grant funding he can remember that has supported the purchase of equipment and hopes the province will continue providing this type of funding in the future.