Do You Drill/Train With Your Neighboring F.D's?

I was wondering who out there regularly drills/trains with their neighboring Fire Departments. Are there special circumstances that need to be trained on such as non matching hose threads, special adaptors, different radios, etc.? Do you provide map books to your mutual aid F.D's so they can find their way to incidents in your area? Do they do the same for you?

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Permalink Reply by John on February 18, 2009 at 8:54pm

We do have the opportunities to do some live training fires from time to time but I have yet to see a joint training exercise with our neighboring Dept's It would be very beneficial to have such training though.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Sterling on February 18, 2009 at 9:16pm

We've invited our neighboring depts. to our Tuesday drill nights many times, but to no avail. Some of these depts. don't even have drill nights. We've asked different members of these depts. if they'ed like to come over and drill with us. And again, no shows! I'd like us all to be on the same page. We all seem to work well together on the fireground, but only after the chaos subsides. You really can tell who drills, and who doesn't. I guess maybe we could try a monthly breakfast/meeting with upper level officers in these depts. to get the ball rolling.

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Nelson on February 18, 2009 at 11:04pm

How can they not drill??? I don't think that I would want to be on the same fire ground with them.

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Permalink Reply by Joey "BigShow" De Piano on February 18, 2009 at 11:34pm

We have sister company..we drill with plus 3 others in our district..on occassion outside the district

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Permalink Reply by Marc on February 19, 2009 at 6:33pm

For us as Explorers we train wiht other depts about about every 6 months.

For the FF's, its a yes well, we try to. Esspecialy my home station (58) because we have Culver City Fire Dept below us, Beverly Hills Fire Dept. above us, Santa Monica FD 3 stations over from us and LA county Fire Dept above Beverly Hills.
This past saturday Culver City FD opened there drill tower to a mutual aid day. LAFD stations 58, 43 and 94's were there with Culver City FD station 1, Beverly Hills Engine 1 & Truck 1, Santa Monica Engine 3 & Battalion 1, and LAco.FD Engine 7 were all there.
We all learned about each others operations. It went from 8:30am to about 4pm.

Also, we handed out new maps to everyone that was there, we all do this
Every station (all depts around here) have maps of the whole entire county with each station of each Dept. marked. At our station we have 2 CCFD maps, 2 BHFD maps, 2 SMFD maps, and 6 LAco.FD maps.

We try and do this at least once a year. Plus LAFD hold a mutual aid day at our main training facility. There are over 12 different dept that show up and train/ talk about eacho others operations.

Out radios are programmed with 18 LAFD channels + 3 mutual aid chanels (LAcoFD, BHHS, and Culver City.)
We do not have a mutual aid channel with Santa Monica FD becuase we handle their dispatch operations.
They are programmed with the 18 LAFD Channels (1 of which is just for SMFD)

other wise we keep to our selfs and dont go with other dept when they need us.

Marc
Los Angeles CITY Fire Dept.

Below is a map of my station (circled in red) and the other Dept around us.

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Permalink Reply by Kaitlin Reick on October 13, 2012 at 12:02am

We have a county mutual aid program that we try to have one dept host a joint drill for the other 3 departments juat something we do since our whole county is volunteer and the firemen, most of them, work out of town and need help to get enough people. So yes we do.

We just recently held a RIT class for the whole county, my dept. hosted and we had to take the skills back and teach the rest of our or their dept how to do it and we will be planning the class for the mutual aid soon.

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Permalink Reply by Russ Gregston on October 13, 2012 at 10:51am

We train together all the time. Being small rural departments both are lacking enough personnel to effectivly take on a major event alone so we have auto mutual aid. All our radio frequencies are the same. What one department doesn't have the other does. Works out quite well