FORT SMITH — The instructors and students may live more than a thousand miles apart but they were on common ground when talk turned to fighting fires last week.

A team of three veteran firefighters, two from New York City and one from the Washington, D.C., area, completed a week-long program of instruction Friday with Fort Smith Fire Department officers on ladder truck operations.

The five-day course culminated Friday morning with a series of simulated calls to an abandoned two-story house in north Fort Smith that served as the laboratory for the program.

About 20 Fire Departmentofficers dressed out in their helmets, boots and bunker suits carried out different scenarios as if they were responding to actual emergencies. After each simulated incident, participants met in the street outside the building so the instructors could critique the response and the officers could discuss their procedures.

“It’s been great training just getting a different perspective because we have our way of doing it,” Assistant Chief Terry Bigler said. “It’s not like we’re doing everything wrong ... but it’s nice to get their perspective on how they do it and how it works for them.”

Bigler said Friday that he had several changes in mind after observing the final training session.

The three instructors work part-time for the Pennsylvania-based Task Force 1, which is composed of expert firefighters, many from large cities. They take time off from their jobs to travel around the country and conduct training programs in incident command, fire-truck driving, ladder-truck operations, working wildfires, and rescue and firefighter survival.

The Task Force 1 team that was in Fort Smith last week was composed of two veteran lieutenants with the New York City Fire Department, Jarod Blake and Chris Bedard, and Shane Darwick, battalion chief for the Fire Department in Montgomery County, Md., who has 35 years of fire fighting experience.

Task Force 1, in businesssince 2005, has carried out training for hundreds of fire departments, according to its website. It also has provided training for several departments in Arkansas cities, including Conway, Rogers, Searcy, Bryant, Hot Springs and Gentry.

Blake said Task Force 1 shows local departments a different way to do things, new ideas and tactics and methods that work for other departments.

The course work “can make their operation work safer, smoother, quicker and, in turn, save a little more property, save a few more lives and keep these guys safe while they do it,” he said.

Last week was the first time a team trained in Fort Smith. But Task Force 1 has visited other places, such as Rogers, more than once.

Bryan Hinds, Rogers assistant fire chief and training officer, said the department has trained with teams from Task Force 1 at least twice, each time focusing on different areas. He said teams have taught or will teach courses in ladder-truck training like that conducted in Fort Smith last week, training on responding to firefighter emergencies, and “The Big One,” fighting large commercial fires.

The last program in Rogers was in September and the next one will be in March, Hinds said.

What Task Force 1 teaches is “the kind of stuff we know how to do but it’s good to have people with new ideas,” he said.

Fort Smith, like other departments, has several sources for training. Fort Smith Fire Chief Mike Richards said the department routinelyreceives training from Oklahoma State University and Texas A&M University. Hinds said his department also has turned to Eastern Oklahoma County Community College for training.

Fort Smith sought training for the ladder truck officers because it is adding a fourth truck and increasing the number of firefighters in each of the ladder trucks from two to three, Bigler said.

With the additional man on board, he said, laddertruck crews will be able to perform a larger number of tasks that they haven’t been able to do with just two to a truck. Some of the basic skills in which the firefighters received instruction in last week’s course were ventilation, forcible entry andsearch-and-rescue, and more advanced skills such as apparatus operations, placement and set-up for rescue, rooftop operations and window rescues.

“It’s not just a book process,” Bigler said. “These guys live it, they do it, they’ve seen it. They know what works and what doesn’t work.”

Darwick said the course was not long and dry classroom lectures but included applying what they learned in the field, in this case the abandoned house.

Richards said the weeklong training cost $16,000. The city was able to use state funds earmarked for training to pay to bring in the Task Force 1 team, he said. It would have been far more expensive to send 20 officers outof town for a week’s training, he said.

The department has been able to expand the ladder truck crews because voters approved a reallocation of a city sales tax in March, Richards said. In addition to providing funds for construction of a new fire station at Chaffee Crossing and doing much needed repair work to the department’s other 10 stations, the sales tax has allowed the city to hire more firefighters.

For the next two years, the additional firefighters will be paid for with a $987,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that was awarded to the city in July, Bigler said. After that, he said, their pay will come from the sales tax.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/03/2012