Heated Battle A Crack Team Of Valley Firefighters Will Soon Leave For Florida For A National Competition To Determine Just Who Is The Roughest, Toughest Of Them All

There are worse ways to spend a January weekend.

Five firefighters from the Spokane Valley Fire District will leave behind a frigid Spokane winter to compete in the national Firefighter Combat Challenge in balmy Tampa, Fla., this weekend.

Preliminaries for the two-day competition begin Friday. The finals are scheduled for Saturday.

The team earned a spot in the national competition with a strong performance in the regional competition last summer.

But the trip, which was paid for by the Valley Fire union, will not be all fun in the sun.

The event will test the firefighters’ training and athletic ability using a course filled with obstacles they commonly face on the job.

Competitors will race through the course in full gear - including air masks - while climbing stairs, pulling hose to the top of a tower, driving a sled with a sledge hammer, spraying water on a target and rescuing a victim all in two minutes.

“We do a lot of classroom training,” Rhys Evan said. “This is a physical outlet.”

Inside today’s Valley Voice is a look at how the five firefighters prepared.

See story and photos on pages 4 and 5

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