Mayday Training at Station 78

By Hannah Falcon

At the Spring Fire Department, training never ends. Firefighters run drills year round to prepare for unique situations in the line of duty. During the month of May, Spring firefighters practice Mayday drills. Mayday is used when a firefighter finds themselves or those around them in a life-threatening situation during a fire.

On Wednesday, May 23, firefighters practiced Pittsburgh and Denver drills at Station 78 under the guidance of Senior Captain Eric Ruple.

“We’ve built some drills to help us, firemen, on the fire ground as far as fire ground survival,” Ruple said. “In the month of May, we teach operations on rescues and we teach skills to help save yourself inside of a fire if and when conditions go bad.”

The Pittsburgh drill is an entanglement drill where firefighters practice navigating through wires that may fall through the ceiling during an office building fire. Developed after three firefighters died in a house fire in Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh drill uses wooden structures to simulate stairs and walls. Firefighters practice moving through small holes in these simulations. In an actual office fire, a firefighter might have to cut a hole in the wall that is small enough to fit between wall studs. That keeps smoke or fire from spreading from room to room.

“What we term in the fire service as the ‘swim technique,’ that’s one of the techniques we use to get through the studs in a wall. We also use a protected swim technique to get through wire entanglement. That helps to keep the wires up and above you so you can push through them,” Ruple said. “As far as the diminished clearance one here, we do what we term as a reduced profile. We get ourselves as small and as skinny as we can so that we’re able to be agile and move our shoulders, hips and waist.”

During the Pittsburgh drill, the firefighters can wear their hoods backwards or put cloth, paper or trash bags inside their masks to simulate the how smoke impedes their sight in an actual fire.

The Denver drill was developed in 1992 after a Denver firefighter died after getting lost and disoriented in an office fire. Spring firefighters train on the Denver drill at least twice a year.

“Because that was a line of duty death, we always try to learn something from it, so the fire service developed the Denver drill,” Ruple said. “This is a drill that we work on the proper techniques of how to get a firefighter and/or victim out of a window from an elevated position.”

Hannah Falcon is a sophomore Communication major at Texas A&M University. A Staff Writer and Life & Arts Editor for the Texas A&M Battalion, Falcon is spending the summer as a volunteer writer for Spring Fire Community News.