Infobox:
The Westbrook Regional Vocational Center’s Public Safety program lets students explore possible careers choices in the field, including visits to the Maine Criminal Justice Academy and hanscom Air Force Base in Massachuestts.
Students learn methods of restraint, crime scene investigation, building searching, laws of evidence, search and rescue techniques and more.
Students from Westbrook, Scarborough, Gorham, Windham and School Administrative District 6 can attend the school, located 125 Stroudwater St.
For more information, call 854-0820, or log on to https://www.edline.net/pages/WRVC.
The five young men looked indistinguishable from professional firefighters as they entered a trailer with smoke billowing out its roof last Friday.
They wore the boots, the pants, the jackets, the helmets, the air tanks. They worked as a team, carrying the hose, crawling on their hands and knees into the trailer and coming back out methodically. They even downed glasses of water after exiting, the way firefighters often do.
The only difference was that these weren’t professional firefighters. They were students of the Westbrook Regional Vocational Center’s Public Safety program, which readies students for becoming firefighters, EMTs and police officers. And this was their first time fighting a real fire, even if it was only a training fire in a specially designed trailer.
For Westbrook High School senior Nick Wilson, who wants to be a police officer, it didn’t matter that it was a staged fire as opposed to the real thing. He said he was nervous before he went into the fire for the first time and was nervous every time after.
Wilson said he thought he’d probably be nervous if he had to do it again, especially if it were a real fire. “That would probably be a lot worse,” he said. “It was exciting.”
Wilson wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Gorham High School senior Josh Merrill, who is a junior firefighter for Windham and Gorham, said it was fun, but facing a fire is a daunting experience.
“It’s one of those things that you can’t really stop being nervous about,” said Merrill.
Merrill and Wilson, along with three of their classmates, were the first students of the vocational center Public Safety program to actually fight a fire.
Westbrook junior Darrell Adams, who was acting as “chief” for the exercise, said he was anxious because it was his first time handling a real fire, although he was excited as well. Up to that point, the students had trained with the equipment but no actual fire. “It’s our first time with a live fire,” he said.
In its inaugural year, the Public Safety program teaches students about police work, emergency medical work and fire fighting. It provides them with training to become professional firefighters upon their graduation and passage of the state test.
According to Dave Roubo of the Westbrook Fire Department, who heads the program, the training is a way for potential recruits to get some experience before they graduate high school and a way for fire departments to tap into the recruit pool.
“We knew that there was a need in the area,” Roubo said of why the program was started. “We’re trying to get the young people interested.”
Roubo, a former Westbrook police officer, said recruitment for fire departments has been down in recent years because the standards for the job are getting stricter. That makes the job more difficult for departments to keep a high number of recruits.
“It just makes them more attractive as recruits,” Westbrook Deputy Fire Chief Thaddeus Soltys said of the training exercise.
The program is the only one of its kind in the state, according to Roubo. While police, EMT and fire programs exist, none has training in all three areas, as the program in Westbrook does.
Of the nine students in the second level of the program, five were medically cleared to enter the training trailer on Friday. In a series of scenarios aided by a team of about a dozen professional firefighters, the five students entered the trailer, crawled around on their hands and knees feeling walls for the fire, and extinguished the fire when they found it.
According to Soltys, the students used the same equipment, the same hoses and the same trailer that professional firefighters use in their own training exercises.
The fire was the culmination of the program in which students learned in the classroom first, and then, through practice, how to use the equipment and eventually tackle a fire.
The students, although nervous, found it exciting.
“A blast. Awesome. Intense,” said Merrill.
Brandon Dyer, a Westbrook senior who was not medically cleared to go into the trailer, worked from the outside, keeping the hose straight and helping in between practice fires.
“It’s so fun, but it’s hard,” he said.
Gray-New Gloucester High School junior Rick Lunn, who wants to be a firefighter and has done other burns as part of junior firefighting, said fighting the fire takes concentration. “You’ve got to really think when you get in there what you’ve got to do,” he said.
Instructor Russ Hawkes, a lieutenant in the Westbrook Fire Department, agreed, saying it would be understandable if the students were nervous their first time.
“It’s definitely an eye-opener,” said Hawkes. “It gets them a chance to see something that very few people get to see.”
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