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Permalink Reply by Brad on December 19, 2008 at 9:50am

Well here is an interesting subject...
First off I will explain our department. Our Ambulance service does our rescue ops. Our fire dept. only does fire suppression...Our Ambulance service is both full time (Paramedics) with part-time paid (EMT's/ambulance drivers) and on call rescue staff. Duty personnel are ambulance only with a paid back up crew. 6 personel per shift that can only do ambulance. So to get to the point-our rescue responses are all on-call/callbacks/part time paid. When we get called it is an all call. Whoever is the supervisor for that shift will put together the team as they arrive. If not enough response then we have two mutual aid depts. that are within 15 mins. of our dept.
Our fire dept. will only allow 5 crossed employed Firefighter/EMT's-so we have to pick our calls sometimes between fire and ems. I work for both and face alot of challenges between the depts.
Fire dept. is on call/paid with a full-time chief and office personel.
Ambulance comes first. The same rescue staff do all the rescues-auto extrication,CSR,Structural collapse, high level and trench. We do train on all desciplines at least once a year. We do hit the CSR/ropes every quarter. With ropes and CSR their are alot of simularities so we can train using the same stratagies and cover both topics. Our city and local businesses let us use their facilities to train in also, so we get some great hands on training in the industry year round. We at least try to do one table top demonstration/lecture with the rest of the desciplines per year. Trench is the most difficult to keep up on-due to lack of any calls and the amount of training needed to stay proficient. We do alot of work with our local Tech-college on all of these disciplines also. We have access to all of the training aids and alot of state funding for training dollars. Hope some of this answers your questions.

Permalink Reply by Jason Brooks on January 2, 2009 at 9:15pm

We have been training every other month, going to monthly in 2009. We are set up for Rope, CSR, Trench, Mud, Ice and Collapse.