The Barriere Fire Department (BFD) spent the past weekend ripping scrapped cars apart.
The destruction was part of an intensive training session to prepare firefighters to take over the responsibility of road rescues.
The responsibility, currently held by the Barriere Search & Rescue team, will effectively fall on the fire department’s shoulders on Oct. 1.
“We’re learning how to take the actual cars apart, dismantle them to safely get to a patient that’s inside,” said Ashley Wohlgemuth, Barriere’s new fire chief.
Firefighters practiced using heavy-duty tools to strategically remove parts of cars for easier access to their patient, all the while calmly explaining each step, she said, “so they’re not terrified anymore than they already are.”
Wohlgemuth said the fire department has “a little bit more manpower” than Search & Rescue, which allows them to react quickly.
“It is going to speed up that process immensely,” she said.
The BFD is dispatched through the Kamloops Fire Centre, according to Wohlgemuth, meaning they can jump to action the moment they’re alerted to an incident.
While they roll out, the fire centre makes the appropriate calls and gets task numbers organized.
Search & Rescue, on the other hand, takes their own calls, organizes their own task numbers and handles their own dispatching, she said.
“Our rolling time is like four to 10 minutes … if somebody’s (stuck) in a car, those minutes mean a lot.”
For Wohlgemuth and many of her firefighters, the training session was their first experience performing road rescues.
“Most of us are brand new to this so we’re starting right at the basics and everybody’s willing to learn. It’s been a good day,” she said on Saturday, Sept. 23, from the Act 1 Services site on Hall Road.
Shane Quiding, owner of Act 1, donated and arranged the ten scrapped cars that the BFD tore apart.
He gave them free rein of his property for the training session.
“The fire department is very important to me … we have a lot of accidents on our highway and people are important,” said Quiding.
Road rescue training will be “ongoing,” according to Wohlgemuth. The BFD will hold a session every few months, for which they’ve been permitted to continue using Quiding’s property.
“I love what we have with our department,” said Wohlgemuth. “They are all amazing and everybody has been fairly receptive to this transition.”
She said Search & Rescue will continue to be “an entity on their own” but that this transition will allow them to focus more on searching.
