Classroom Work

Last night we did a lot of classroom work on wildfire awarness, arson awarness and salvage and overhaul. Wildfires are your typical forest fires or brush fires. Although I will probably never see a real forest fire in the area where I volunteer its still something we need to know about. We learned different ways to read a wildfire and how we can stop them from spreading. Arson awarness and salvage and overhaul go hand in hand. We need to be aware of what is around us while we are fighting a fire and we need to be sure that we are careful with how we do things so that we do not disturb any evidence. Arson is very common these days so we need to know what signs to look for when we approach a fire. Things like broken windows, blocked roadways, people leaving the home quickly and even people in the general public talking about what they saw. Any of this evidence needs to be presented to our fire marshal. Salvage and overhaul is the process of cleaning up after the fire. We need to save any of the homeowner's possesions and protect what has not been damaged in the fire. We also need to still be aware of any signs of arson or any other evidence that may determine the cause of the fire. While performing overhaul we also need to keep an eye out on the structure. If the structure has become weakened by the fire we cannot perform over overhaul tasks. Its a lot of important things to remember but its stuff we need to do to protect people's property and help determine the cause of a fire.