Fighting fire with prevention: Fire Chief for a Day learns tricks and tools of fighting fires
Nine-year-old Bryan Ellis was put through the paces after winning a fire escape plan contest
FERGUS – He put out a fire with a fire extinguisher. He sprayed water from a fire hose.
He even helped take a door off a vehicle using spreaders, cutters and a hammer to break the windshield.
June 11 proved to be an exciting day for nine-year-old Bryan Ellis, a grade 4 student at Salem Public School who was selected as this year’s Fire Chief for a Day by staff at Centre Wellington Fire Rescue.
He was picked up at school in an aerial truck, was taken to the Fergus fire hall where he was sworn in, had lunch with some firefighters and then had an afternoon full of engaging, educational and exciting activities.
Fire prevention officer Chris Paluch and Wellington County training officer Charles Hamilton led Ellis through the activities, explaining why and how to do the things firefighters do as a matter of course.
Paluch even invited Ellis’s mother Gillian, and members of the media who were present, to use the fire extinguisher.
“If you’ve never used one, you might not think of using one in a fire situation,” Paluch said as he explained the acronym PASS – Pull the pin; Aim at the fire; Squeeze the trigger; and Sweep the spray at the base of the fire.
Ellis tried on an air tank. It weighs almost as much as he does, so Paluch held it on Ellis’s back. But he breathed in the oxygen and understood that firefighters need this piece of equipment to protect them from smoke inhalation.
There’s about 45 minutes of oxygen in a tank with normal breathing; that reduces to 20 minutes when firefighters are breathing hard fighting a fire.
“That’s our life in a bottle,” Hamilton said.
Centre Wellington Fire Rescue has offered Fire Chief for a Day for three years in conjunction with Crime Stoppers. Students in grades 4, 5 and 6 are invited to draw a fire escape plan for their own homes and Paluch said Ellis’ was the best by far.
“He worked really hard on the escape plan,” his mother Gillian said.
“He was super excited about the possibility of being Fire Chief for a Day.”
Paluch said public education and fire prevention are the first lines of defence when it comes to fires and they visit schools, seniors’ centres and other organizations to teach fire safety and prevention lessons.
Actually putting out fires is the third step and one they hope they’ll never have to do.
Incidents in Centre Wellington are pretty low compared to other municipalities, but they still average two or three calls per day.
The follow-up fire investigation can also indicate trends or hazards not previously recognized and inform future fire prevention sessions and even different ways of fighting fires.
For Ellis, the best part of the day was taking the door off the car.
“It was very satisfying,” he said. “And having my friends (at school) think I was getting arrested” when uniformed firefighters arrived to pick him up at the start of the day.
Maybe he’ll think about becoming a firefighter one day, he said.
“It was pretty cool.”
