The mission of the Pattonville Training Division is to provide quality, realistic, and contemporary training in order to deliver the best possible emergency services to the community in the safest, most efficient and most effective manner possible. A major part of our training program is focused on the skills needed to be a safe and effective fire fighter.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and Insurance Services Organization (ISO) are two major organizations that help shape our firefighting training. In general, our firefighting training comes in two major categories; practice of individual manual skills, and live fire training where we put those skills into practice in a real fire scenario.
The firefighting skills are many and include such things as building size-up, forcible entry of locked doors, fire hose deployment, ladders, search and rescue, self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) skills, roof and other types of ventilation, thermal camera use, fire fighter rescue, ladder truck operations, fire hydrant connections, pumping operations, incident command, etc.
Live fire training can be done in several ways but typically involves the use of a burn tower (a building that can be used over and over for live fire practice), buildings using fake smoke (to simulate smoke-filled buildings), and other training ground props (stairwells, roof simulators, etc.). This live fire training is used to bring all the individual skills together in a “real life” simulation using different scenarios that challenge and test the skills of fire fighters and incident commanders.
This combination of training methods provides our community with highly trained fire fighters that have not only learned the necessary skills but have been tested and proven to be able to perform those skills under the most dangerous of situations. Our training program allows us to know that when our fire fighters are called to the scene of a fire they will not only know what needs to be done but they will also be able to safely, efficiently and effectively do “Whatever it Takes” to save lives and protect property.
