As dawn broke on a rainy Saturday morning, a group of elected and appointed officials suited up alongside Crawfordsville firefighters and paramedics.
By lunchtime, they had rescued a child from a smoky building, dragged hoses through a burning house, performed CPR on a cardiac arrest victim and cut apart a vehicle with the “jaws of life.”
The exercises were staged by members of Crawfordsville Professional Firefighters Union Local 4143, who invited the local leaders to the department’s training grounds to experience what it’s like to fight fires and provide emergency medical care.
“This is to show them what we do day in and day out,” Local 4143 member Kurt Davis said.
The firefighters were joined for “Fire Ops 101” by Crawfordsville City Council members Andy Biddle, Ethan Hollander and Kent Priebe, Montgomery County Council member Tom Mellish and Madison and Ripley Township trustees Greg Fuller and Jamie Selby.
Representing the appointed officials were Crawfordsville Police Chief Aaron Mattingly and Crawfordsville Fire Merit Commission members Vern Rager and Rick Warner.
“Even when I was [an elementary school] principal, I tried to sit in everyone’s seat,” said Mellish, who donned a self-contained breathing apparatus and followed Hollander into a smoke-filled firefighter survival maze for a mock search-and-rescue operation.
The event also gave the officials a hands-on look at the equipment they approve the funding for while showing them how many firefighters fill a shift.
“If you have a working fire in Indianapolis, it’s like the Civil War — they just keep throwing bodies at it. In Crawfordsville, it’s not that way. They have limited resources,” said Tom Hanify, president of Professional Firefighters Union of Indiana, who addressed the participants before the exercises.
As flames filled the inside of a simulated house, firefighter/paramedic Seth McCloud helped Biddle and Selby gear up to crawl inside. The flames topped 400 degrees, about half the temperature of an actual fire.
“Our training is what keeps us going,” McCloud said. “The intensity of our trainings today reflects how we’re going to do on the fire.”
