Sometimes I’m amazed we all stuck with it.
I got hired in a group of three. Of the two other guys one was my age (30) and the other a year or two older. Our orientation was plagued with incidents, injuries, and ill advised training practices. Looking back, I understand what they were trying to accomplish, but almost nothing worked out like it was supposed to.
The first day we reported to training we were met by the newly appointed training chief who was holding three brightly colored tie dyed t-shirts. Wait, let me go back a step. The normal uniform for PT is a blue t-shirt and shorts with the department logo on them. As a means of instilling a goal in us, we were not allowed to wear a department t-shirt during orientation - we had to earn it. Instead we wore plain white tees and department shorts. The Chief passed out the tie dyed shirts to us and told us to put them on. He then took us on a three mile run around the city.
Now, we were firefighter recruits in pretty good shape, but not one of us was a “runner”. This would prove important as the training wore on. Apparently, the point of the tie dyed shirts was to instill in us the fact that everything we do is in the public eye and that they are watching our every move - we’d better get used to it and respect it. Toe the line, someone is always watching.
It really was not a big deal to us. No one felt stupid wearing the shirts, we just didn’t really get it immediately. But the message was driven home much more forcefully when the Chief got called on the carpet by his bosses for subjecting the new recruits to what someone else viewed as “hazing”. So it was true, someone is always watching.
We were told that every morning, before 8 a.m. (the official start of training) we were to run this course together (the three of us) in less than 30 minutes. So, taking three non-runners and having them run three miles a day on hard city streets before a day of puling hose and throwing ladders, etc. eventually took its toll on one of my classmate's knees and he had to stop running. That left just two of us to do the run which would later become known as the “Bataan Death March” by the other line personnel.
Shortly after the knee injury we got our first day of live fire training. We would take turns advancing a hoseline into the burn room, feeling the heat, staying low, putting just enough water on the fire to darken it down and then let it build up again. As we went in time and time again our gear and our gloves became wetter and wetter. On the final pass, my, as yet uninjured, classmate felt his hand really heating up inside his glove but he wasn’t about to say anything and be dubbed the weakest link. He was the last one to go through so the Chief told him to advance all the way in to the burn room and put the fire out completely. In the process of doing that, so much heat was generated that the water in his glove turned to steam and literally boiled his hand inside his glove. He came out of the burn room and pulled off his glove along with a pretty decent amount of skin. It looked something like this:
The paramedic on the crew we were with that day treated the burn immediately and the Chief threw him in his car and drove him off to the hospital. He didn't get pain meds until they reached the hospital and it was not a pleasant ride. Needless to say, the Chief heard quite a bit about that one too.
With one hand and nearly one knee out of commission the chiefs had to rearrange the entire training schedule and do anything and everything that wasn’t manipulative first. With the burn to the hand, my classmate wasn’t even supposed to sweat so he couldn’t do the morning run either. I asked the Chief if I was supposed to report early and still run by myself. In a frustrated and somewhat defeated tone he said no. It was supposed to have been a team building exercise and it wouldn’t serve any purpose for me to run alone. So the morning run became a thing of the past.
In the long run, we all passed and moved on without permanent injury. Although, the rest of our orientation was not without further incident. But that will be a story for another day.
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