Future firefighters feel the heat

Students accepted into Career Center’s rescue program

Kristin Harty

CRESAPTOWN — The fire was staged Tuesday morning at Burn Building 841, a gutted concrete-block structure where firefighters train.

But the smoke was real enough.

“How do you tell if a fire is out?” asked Walter May, part-time instructor at the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute. “... The color of the smoke. See this darker, yellowish smoke? That’s not steam. It’s fire.”

Ten Allegany County high school students watched as firefighters-in-training quickly extinguished the blaze.

Next year, those students will be putting out fires themselves.

All sophomores and juniors, they’ve been accepted into the Center for Career and Technical Education’s fire and rescue program, a four-year-old training opportunity that hasn’t attracted the kind of interest instructors had hoped.

“We’re trying to grow it,” said Deborah Bittinger, principal of the Career Center. “It is an intense program, so we have to have students who are interested enough that they really want to pursue this.”

The yearlong program gives students the opportunity to earn up to 18 college credits and includes classes in firefighting, rescue and emergency medical services, said Kingsley Poole, regional coordinator of the Fire and Rescue Institute. There is no cost.

To qualify, students must be at least 16 by Sept. 1 and must join a local volunteer fire department sometime before school starts in the fall.

Local firefighting units will help make that happen, said Tim Dayton, a representative of Volunteer Firefighter Service of Allegany County.

Across the country, there’s a shortage of volunteers, Poole said.

“Probably it started in the ’70s,” said Poole, who said fewer employers allow workers to leave “when the fire whistle sounds” these days. “It’s become more acute as the years have gone by.”

Just hours before Tuesday morning’s three-hour workshop for students, more than 100 firefighters from across the region worked overnight to extinguish a four-alarm fire in Frostburg. It took about nine hours and a million gallons of water to extinguish the fire, which started in the basement of Gianni’s Pizza, officials said.

High School junior Tyler Huff tried to get to the Frostburg fire, but police blockades prevented it.

“From what I heard, it was rockin’ and rollin’ before anybody even knew about it,” said Huff, who completed the Career Center’s fire and rescue program last year and helped conduct demonstrations for new students Tuesday. He checked oxygen tanks after the staged fire was out.

“It would be nice to do this for a living,” said Huff, who volunteers with the Shaft Volunteer Fire Department. “Or be fire marshal. Either one.”

Students interested in signing up for the fire and rescue program are urged to talk to Career Center staff to get details, Bittinger said. The program, which requires students to attain substantial physical strength, isn’t easy, she said. When it started in 2006, Bittinger completed several firefighter training exercises.

“I can remember at one point, I have never been claustrophobic or anything, but I really felt closed in, crawling through those areas,” she said. “I mean, you’re crawling through like you’re looking for victims ... I just gained a whole new respect for the people out there doing this.”

Sophomore Zachary Plummer said he signed up for the program because firefighting is in his blood.

“I got three generations in the fire department,” Plummer said. “All volunteer. I got all three of my brothers in it now. My dad’s in it. I’ve been raised around it.”

Contact Kristin Harty at kharty@times-news.com.

For more information about the fire and rescue

program at the Center for Career and Technical Education, call CCTE at (301) 729-6486.