Firefighters receive unique training for children’s bus safety
LANSING, Mich. (WILX) -Firefighters had the chance today to get hands on in an emergency situation. The city of Mason Fire Department partnered with Mason Public Schools to do a school bus extraction training. This is a new training opportunity fire fighters haven’t seen in years.
“Typically we run vehicle extractions on just your normal passenger cars so this is something that a lot of us aren’t familiar with. This gets us more familiar with the construction of school busses and busses in general and hopefully develop skills and get us comfortable so we’re not learning at the real scene we’re actually doing it on a training ground,” said Scott Preadmore with the Mason Fire Department.
Firefighters began their training in the classroom.
“We started off today doing a couple hours of classroom and we’ve been doing hands on for probably about an hour and we’ve got a couple hours this afternoon,” said Fire fighter Scott Etzel.
Mason Public Schools provided a retired school bus, which otherwise would have been sent to a scrap yard.
“The City of Mason has a really great partnership with Mason Public Schools and this is just furthering that partnership,” said Preadmore.
Firefighters used the bus to demonstrate and practice effective evacuation.
“We do search and rescue for house fires, ladders, we do a number of different trainings This is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to do bus training so it’s a great opportunity. Hopefully we never have to use it. It’s something that if we do, we have an idea of the construction and different scenarios of how to resolve issues,” said Etzel.
The Mason Fire Department said this is their first time doing this in 10 years. While hands on training is rare due to a lack of access to busses for this use, the Mason Fire Department regularly trains on this emergency in a classroom lecture. They do a variety of trainings every other week.
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