Remember the grade school days of show and tell? For some of us it’s a foggy memory of standing up in front of the class with a favorite action figure toy or creepy crawly stuff in jars. I recently participated in a different, but no less fun and informative show and tell session with a bunch of firefighters.
Apparatus from five towns in my area gathered for a regional training session on rural water supply and we got the idea for a fire toys show and tell.
We had eight apparatus halfway circling the Wentworth, N.H., town common on a gorgeous fall afternoon and one by one, each department talked about their apparatus and what was in the compartments. It was a great way to learn about what they liked about their trucks, some things they didn’t and to show off new gadgets and equipment.
How many of us have even see a Z-valve, never mind know how to use it. Or how about a clapper valve? That’s a little more common, but still not an everyday kind of appliance. And the list goes on and on. It was interesting to see what the guys were pulling out of the compartments.
We looked at new LED scene lights and heard about their attributes and how much better they were than the halogen bulbs. They’re just like daylight, the firefighters exclaimed.
One department was showing off a pretty new, blue ground monitor they had just bought. We actually flowed water in that during the training exercise, so we had a little more hands-on involvement with that appliance.
Another department showed off a 750-gpm, gasoline-powered pump that put out an “ohmygod” amount of water, but was a little on the noisy side.
We showed off our brand new Chimney Scrubber kit and talked about some of the featured we’d like to get on a new engine in the next year or so and got reactions from our thoughts.
While showing off their equipment, the participating firefighters offered testimony about the performance and how to use it providing invaluable information upon which future purchases could be based. It’s one thing to listen to a sales person making a pitch, it’s quite another to hear from the firefighters who use it and the chiefs who bought them.
Even when it came to talking about the apparatus, the firefighters offered pros and cons about what they specified for their rigs. A department with a booster reel mounted on the back of their pumper loved it and couldn’t imagine a truck without it. I know about the huge debates on booster reels and that maybe a topic for another discussion, but it sparked some departments to consider the feature.
Roll-up doors versus pan-formed cabinet doors was another topic of discussion. The idea is we all learned from people who have first-hand experience using the very items others were considering.
With our own eyes, we could see cabinet layouts, features that we may want to specify on our next apparatus and something that wouldn’t work at all for our operations. It was like a virtual trade show with narration from people who actually used the products and equipment.
Sometimes, this kind of show and tell happens organically at a parade or a big mutual aid fire, but neither of those venues are really conducive to the kind of in-depth discussion that happened after our training exercise. We spent well over an hour looking at each of the apparatus that span from a 2013 model year to one dating at least a couple of decades. And, because we’re all located within about 20 miles of each other, or less, we all deal with similar conditions, structures, weather and even budget constraints.
The lessons learned and the information shared was invaluable and will undoubtedly factor into future purchasing decisions my department will make. Besides, it’s good to know what the neighbors have in case you have to work with them, or borrow something at a fire scene. For instance, our neighbors now know we have a four-inch gated wye that we purchased last year and is good for filling two tankers at once, among other applications.
There’s nothing like touching, seeing and hearing about stuff during show and tell. Try it at your next regional training session. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll learn.
