Rural Firefighters Go Back To School Using Jaws Of Life Among Topics At Weekend Academy

Sunday was a very, very rough day for a gray Buick Park Avenue sitting outside the Post Falls fire station.

With its wheels in the air and broken glass surrounding its smashed-in roof, the Buick lost its doors and roof to firefighters hoisting gigantic hydraulic tools.

A bad day for the car, yes, but a good day for the firefighters, who learned how to stabilize a vehicle and cut it away from an accident victim.

The extrication session was one of several classes offered during the weekend at the annual North Idaho Fire Chiefs’ Academy, which wrapped up Sunday. Nearly 200 firefighters, many of them volunteers from rural districts in North Idaho and Washington, attended classes at Lake City High School and several field locations.

“There’s so many little details,” said Kathy Flint, a volunteer with the East Side Fire District, covering the area between Beauty Bay and Harrison. “It’s not just putting water on a fire.”

Flint spent the weekend learning about rural water supplies, how to battle blazes in areas where fire hydrants are as common as skyscrapers. She learned how to stop up water in a culvert to form a pond and how to calculate how many gallons per minute a water tanker can deliver.

Other groups learned how to put out wildfires, how to keep track of everyone at a fire scene, how to work with the public, and how to set up a command post at a fire.

“I’ve learned so much,” said Wes Portrey, a volunteer firefighter in Naples, Idaho.

Portrey got to use a set of $50,000 extrication tools, which cost more than two times his fire department’s annual budget.

After propping up the back end of the Buick on wood blocks (called “cribbing”), Portrey and the other firefighters inflated super-strong pillows to ease the car’s nose and roof off the ground. They hefted a spreader and a cutter, commonly known as the Jaws of Life, to remove the car’s doors and roof.

“We don’t cut the patient out of the car, we cut the car away from the patient,” Post Falls Fire District Capt. John Ryan explained.

At an accident scene, all this must happen in less than 15 minutes for a seriously injured patient to have any hope of survival, Ryan said.

“The only way you can get that is practice,” he said.