Putting Courage to the Test : Tough Program Challenges Firefighter Recruits

A recruit is standing on the roof of a one-story building next to a ladder reaching to the ground at the Los Angeles City Fire Department Training Center in North Hollywood.

As Capt. Brian Allen, a training instructor, watches, the recruit grasps the ladder and begins to chant: “Hand! Foot, foot, hand!”

Allen, who bears a strong resemblance to actor Tom Cruise, grins and turns to a visitor and says, “That’s the way we teach folks how to get on and get off of a ladder. She’ll remember this simple drill as long as she’s a firefighter.”

Climbing onto a ladder from the roof of a one-story building is child’s play in this environment, where people are taught to survive situations that can bring death, serious injury or disfigurement from burns or falls if the rules aren’t followed. Sometimes, the worst will happen even when they are.

Each safety move has been paid for with the lives and burn injuries of the firefighters who preceded these recruits. It is a point that is drilled into each one of them.

One of the recruits is actually a five-year Fire Department paramedic named Dennis Ohligschlager. Even he found the training surprisingly complex.

“You have to be a jack-of-all-trades, learning various phases of building construction and learning about utilities,” Ohligschlager said. “The learning is endless. You can never learn it all.”

There is a mild military semblance to the training as recruits shout “Yes, sir!” in unison to instructors, and run across the concrete training ground “on the double,” making square turns like Marines in a parade on the concrete’s expansion joint cracks.

According to Fire Department instructors, the reason the recruits learn to walk on the cracks is to drill into them the art of walking on “the members,” the parapets and strong crossbeams that make up a roof. Firefighters are taught this so they won’t fall through a roof into a burning building.

Classes of hopeful recruits report at 6 a.m. five days a week for 15 weeks to the “drill tower”--the department’s term for the training center--where they are taught the mechanics of handling Fire Department equipment.

This particular class is known as an A Platoon. (The Fire Department works on a three-platoon system--A, B and C). In the training, they learn the proper method of hooking hoses to hydrants as well as handling unwieldy ladders alone and in teams.

They also learn how to survive in a “flashover container,” a metal container in which a fire is built, where temperatures are so hot--exceeding 600 degrees Fahrenheit--that some of the recruits’ helmets will melt.

Recruit Janine Cochran, a former physical therapy technician at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, remembers lying on the floor of the flashover container and envisioning that she was actually in a home, and it was her job to save the occupants. “I kept thinking there were lives in there, and they were counting on us to save them,” she said.

On the first day, recruits are introduced to the drill tower, a concrete structure resembling a rectangular box that rises six stories. According to Battalion Chief Robert Teachenor, who commands the training center, the tower is actually seven stories tall if you count the mezzanine.

“This is where the recruit builds his confidence: climbing the iron ladder straight up the side of that 75-foot tower and knowing that his hands and feet are the only thing between him and the concrete down below,” Teachenor said.

During a short lunch break at a recent training session, recruits were asked to stand, introduce themselves, and say who they are and why they are at the drill tower.

“I want to make my family proud of me,” said recruit Vincent Guiterrez.

April Mangels, the recruit who had been training with the ladder, said: “The pressure and the stress is on you all the way to the end to make it. You really have to want this job to stay.”

One of two women in a class of 13, she feels the training program is harder for women than men. “We naturally don’t have the upper body strength men do. . . . They don’t lower the requirements and there is no special treatment at all,” she said.

Mangels graduated. Her classmates, she said, helped her as she helped them. “No one can go through this alone. It was total teamwork!”

Toward the end of the 15-week program, the recruits learn to jump out a fourth-floor window in the tower (actually the fifth floor if you consider the mezzanine) into an inflated nine-foot-tall air bag.

Lance Matthews, a 1991 Cal State Northridge journalism graduate and most recently a marketing representative for Eastman Kodak, said the training has changed his thinking.

“When you jump into that air bag you have to trust yourself,” he said. “They train you to do that here. I also learned about discipline and how to maintain my focus so I can be in control when everybody else is out of control.”

Jumping out of a building that has a perfectly good stairwell epitomizes the curious and dangerous nature of being a firefighter. “Most people will run out of a burning building. Our people are trained to run into it,” said Capt. William Cody of the training staff.

Instructors instill into the recruits the necessity of finding electrical wires so they won’t get hurt if the power lines haven’t been shut off. They are taught the basics of construction so they can identify roofs and know which types are more likely to collapse. They are shown how to use specialized body harnesses attached to the aerial ladder on a firetruck for rescues from ledges and holes, Cody said.

“Our recruits are also given specialized training at our Urban Search and Rescue site in trench rescues, where they learn to stabilize the walls of a ditch or trench and then extricate a victim,” Cody said.

Recruits also attend emergency medical training classes. Upon completion they are certified as emergency medical technicians in addition to their firefighter status.

Competition for the job is stiff (beginning salary is $33,000 annually) and Fire Department training standards are high. So not all of the 15 people who began the training made it to the end. Only 13 graduated.

On July 29, Platoon A recruits received their badges in a ceremony before family and friends at the tower. Firefighter Janine Cochran probably summed up the feelings of the group when she said: “I feel great. I’m nervous and excited and I am proud!”