Divemedic

Central Florida Fire Academy

To orient you: On the grounds of the fire academy, the classrooms were in th5 buildings in the lower right corner. The building labeled “2966” was the burn building. Three stories tall, it’s where we did all of our practice fires. The building just above the word “Central” was set up for climbing, rappelling, and ladder drills. The field just below it and to the left was where we practiced natural gas and vehicle fires. The large building just below the pond had a fire station and some dark mazes in it.

There were field sessions and classroom sessions. Classroom sessions were where we learned regulations, fire theory, and which NFPA chapter regulated what activity. I remember the fire academy was divided into two sections- the first section lasted about 3 months, and we did about 1/3 field work and 2/3 classroom. Session two was flipped- another three months of about 80% field work.

We began every field day in the fire academy the same way:

We would line up in ranks on the pavement in front of that fire station with our gear on the ground in front of us. The chief instructor would walk in and yell “GO!” and you would have 60 seconds to get all of your gear on properly. Then the drills would start.

I went to the academy on a schedule that saw us doing field sessions all through the summer. That was brutal. You learn not to eat breakfast or lunch. All we would have for breakfast and lunch was gallon jugs of Gatoraide. I swear I was drinking two to three gallons of that stuff every single day I was in school. The instructors used to tell us that, if we did eat, we should eat something colorful so our vomit would be entertaining. They called it our art project. I think I threw up in training at least once a month. You try not to get it on you or your teammates, wipe your mouth, and keep going. For God’s sake don’t throw up while you have an SCBA mask on.

Half of the field days in session two was always us doing the “Big Three.” You would put on an airpack for time and score, then pull an uncharged hose from the hose bed about 200 feet, charge it, then use the water stream to knock down three cones that were 50 feet away. Then move over to pick up and carry a 100 pound ladder through an obstacle course and raise it against that ladder drill building. All in full gear, all for time, and all of it with the instructors grading everything.

You could lose points:

• If you forgot to sing out that both of the pressure gauges on the SCBA were within 100 psi of each other
• Didn’t call out that you had checked that the dogs on the ladder were both locked, points off
• staggered on your feet when water pressure was applied, points off.
• Face shield on your helmet not all the way down, points off
• If either end of the ladder touched anything it wasn’t supposed to (the ground, a cone, another student), you guessed it…

There seemed to be an endless list of things that got points deducted.

We did hundreds of drills that included:

• crawling through pitch black mazes that went up and down stairs, had ropes in them set up to entangle you, dolls and mannequins hidden in them you had to find, sometimes with choke points so small that in order to make it through you had to take the tank off your back while keeping the mask on, pass the tank through first, then put it back on after clearing the choke point.
• raising a 30 foot ladder to completely vertical, fellow students holding it there with ropes while you climbed up one side, went over the top, then climbed back down the other side.
• Rappelling from the third floor to the ground, then learning to rappel from the third floor in to the second floor window, tie a harness on to another student, attach them to your gear, then out that window with them to the ground.
• We ran the combat challenge once a month

And of course we put out fires: Basement fires, car fires, gas fires, you name it, we learned to put it out. It was an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. We did everything you could think of that a basic firefighter would do. Practiced with axes, saws, pike poles, air chisels, crowbars, you name it.

Even training like this was dangerous. Several firefighter candidates have been killed in training. One in Miami died from heat stress. Another in Orlando after falling from the ladder building was giving her class a thumbs up as they took her to the hospital. Her aorta ruptured after she got to the ED, and she died right there. It’s a dangerous business.

At the end of all of that training, a state examiner came and tested our skills. First a written exam, followed by “the Big Three,” then 5 random skills and an oral quiz about HAZMAT procedures. My class started with 30 people. Of them 24 graduated, and 22 of us passed the state exam.

As far as I know, all but two of us is now retired, and those two are now chief level officers.

For the most part, the women didn’t do as well. There were 5 women in my class. Two didn’t get certified. Of the three who did, one was a beast. She was a Native American and I swear her Indian name had to be Kicks Lots of Ass. That woman was a true warrior who didn’t know what the word quit meant. She was also the oldest one of us. I can’t imagine going through that class as a 40 year old.

One of the guys who didn’t pass was a heartthrob. Women loved him, he was a good looking guy who had abs that looked like he did sit-ups in his sleep. Strong as an ox and could run laps for days. He was a nice guy, but he was dumb as a post. He was so good looking that he was the one the local news channel did a story on how hard it was to become a firefighter. So why did he fail?

I spent 4 hours the day before the state test trying to teach him the eight knots you had to know to pass the state test. In that four hours, I managed to get him to tie one of them correctly on a consistent basis: a bowline. (Some of the others were clove hitch, figure eight, figure eight on a bight, chimney knot, sheep shank, sheet bend, I can’t remember what the eighth was, it’s been 30 years) Anyhow, as luck would have it, the knot he was asked to tie by the examiner was the one knot he had been able to master- the bowline.

He got it wrong and failed the exam.

That fire academy no longer exists. It shut down, and a chapter of central Florida history came to a close. 48 years of teaching young recruits to become firefighters. Three classes a year most years, usually 20-30 per class. Thousands of firefighters began their careers there.

Everyone seems to enjoy the inside information from the fire department. So here is a brief series about what the fire department in Florida is like. Of course details vary by department, and we aren’t like departments up north, where the department pays your way through the academy. (unless you are a minority or a woman- see below)

Licensure

Firefighting is a pretty popular career. To become a firefighter in Florida, the law says you have to be licensed by the state. There are two ways to do that-

• Go through the fire academy, which takes from 4-6 months (depending on how many hours you go per week). When I went, we trained three nights per week for 4 hours each, and 8 hours on Saturday. It took 6 months. About 80% of those who began my class went on to pass the licensing exam.
• Or, if you can prove you were a certified firefighter from another state, you could challenge the exam. Most who do this don’t pass, mostly because they don’t understand the little things the examiners are looking for.

That licensing exam is a beast. First, a written test, followed by a practical exam. The practical exam is things like knot tying, hazardous materials awareness, and the “big three.” There are many small places where you can lose points, and missing more than a few of them means you fail. Passing says you have passed “minimum standards” to work as a firefighter in Florida. The journey is just beginning.

Once you complete that hurdle, you have to become either an EMT-Basic, or a Paramedic. It isnt’ required by law, but I don’t know of a single fire department that hires firefighters who aren’t also certified in one of these. EMT takes 1-3 months, and Paramedic takes 6 months to a year, depending on how many hours per week your school holds class. Then of course, there is the obligatory licensing exam.

There are a few departments who will hire EMTs and Medics without fire certifications, but they can’t fight fire, and get A LOT less money. Some other departments will hire paramedics and then put them through the fire academy, medic school is more demanding than the fire academy.

Many applicants will work for an ambulance company somewhere while waiting to be hired. The pay is not very good (Taco Bell pays more than EMTs make driving an ambulance), and spending too long at one of these companies (more than 2 years or so) gets you labeled as unhirable. Departments just assume there is something wrong with you.

Hiring Process

So now you are a certified firefighter. How do you get a job? You look for fire departments that are hiring. Some departments are better than others. Each has different pay and benefit structures. Some are better at their jobs or better equipped than others. You really should research a department before you apply.

Some departments have additional requirements. Some require that you be certified as a HAZMAT Technician, some hire paramedics only, some require that you be a certified Emergency Vehicle Operator. It varies by department. Generally, the more certs a department requires, the more it pays, the better it is to work there, and the more competitive the hiring process.

Some departments don’t get enough qualified minority applicants, so they will hire a limited number of uncertified people. The competition is fierce for these spots. One department I know of got applicants from all over the USA for these spots. If selected, those departments pay you to attend the schools to get your certification. Some departments play it shady to increase minority applications for those programs- one even ran the ads for it only in Spanish and only in the Spanish only newspapers in the area.

When my old department would have an opening, we would get about 200 applications for each open position. Departments like Boca Raton and Orlando have very high starting pay and great benefits. As a result, they get the pick of the best, and will get up to a thousand applicants for each open position. There had to be a way to filter out the lazy and stupid. There are numerous ways to do that.

We had a written exam, as most departments do. Of those who took the exam, the top 25% were invited to return for the practical exam. The practical exam can be as simple as a combat challenge, or a more complex one. Here is the combat challenge, which looks easy, but certainly is not:

You have to finish that in less than 8 minutes to even be considered, many can’t finish at all. My best time is 3 minutes and 42 seconds, and that is a good time. The stuff you see them using in that video is full weight firefighting equipment. These guys in the video are some of the fastest in the world at that drill. In fact, the world record is 1:14.76, so the guy in that video is only about 3 seconds from a world record.

• That firefighting gear is heavy and hot. It’s like exercising while wearing a 40 pound sleeping bag.
• Those rolled up hoses at the beginning on the stairs? the one he carries is about 70 pounds. The roll he hoists with a rope is about 50 pounds. Those gloves are slick, and they make that hoist a challenge
• Your feet have to touch every step on the way down.
• That metal beam on the sled that he’s hitting and driving with a sledge? It weighs 150 pounds
• That charged hose he’s dragging weighs about 170 pounds with the water in it
• The dummy he’s carrying weighs about 200 pounds.

These exercises are designed to wear you down, upper and lower body, as well as cardio. It’s difficult. As I said, many people can’t do it. When I did my personal best of 3:42, I almost passed out at the end. I had to have people help me get my gear off because my arms refused to work and I was seeing stars, which before that point I thought was a myth.

Some departments have you crawl through mazes in the dark, with the mazes being very nearly to small to fit through. Other departments have medical scenarios. The end result is the same- the department generates a hiring list that narrows down those hundreds of applicants to a ranked list of perhaps 20 or 30 recruits, and the department hires from that list. The people who tend to be at the top of one department’s list tend to be at the top of everyone’s list, so most departments only consider their lists valid for six months before retesting to generate another list.

When an applicant is offered the job, they are background tested. Those requirements vary. All will exclude people with felonies. Some departments will exclude anyone with a misdemeanor, or require waivers. My department was no criminal convictions ever, and no traffic tickets in the past 36 months.

When I was hired, I tested for three different fire departments:

• In the first, I was #7 on the selectee list. They hired numbers 1-5, number 14, and number 19. Why did they skip? Number 14 was a paramedic, and number 19 was a woman. There are very, very few women firefighters. Quotas, don’t you know.
• The second one, I don’t know why I didn’t get it.
• I was hired by the third department- there were two of us hired that year. It was the first time in 2 years they had hired anyone, and the other firefighter hired with me was a woman.

Yeah, being a woman, a minority, or a paramedic makes it much easier to get hired. If you can manage to be all three, you can pretty much have your choice of any department you want. White EMTs without experience? Your odds are about 1 in 400 of getting hired by the time you consider schooling and the hiring process. Some don’t make it through training, and many people go through the licensure process and never get hired before their firefighting license expires. They will never get hired. Like sperm, they die off before ever becoming what they could have been.

Hired

From there, you are hired as a probationary firefighter. There is a training program for most departments, then you make it on to a crew. Once you report to the crew, there is still more training before you can operate on your own, and before you can get off probation. Your crew and the training officers decide if you make it all the way through your probation. That’s a future post.