Deltaville-Hartfield fire school training continues

The young men in the Deltaville-Hartfield Basic Fire School put their classroom lessons to the test during simulated fire training at the Gloucester fire training facility.

On Sunday, March 26, the training firefighters learned what it’s like to enter and move around in a building with smoke so thick “you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It was very realistic,” said Paul Murray, assistant chief of the Lower Middlesex Volunteer Fire Department in Deltaville.

The trainees got practical experience performing a coordinated attack on a fire using skills such as forceable entry through a jammed door, search and rescue victims in a smoky room, hoseline deployment and more. The class was split into three groups and each group got a chance at each job. For example one group would be rescuing a victim while another would make a coordinated attack on the fire. “They put all those skills together,” said Murray. “They all did very well.”

The class has 18 members that have been meeting since the first part of January, learning everything from CPR to how to extricate victims from crashed vehicles.