RONAN — Almost a dozen fire agencies from across Lake County gathered together on Saturday for a cross-agency training to hone their skills for the upcoming fire season.
“I just joined very recently and I'm looking to get some good training to get started,” said Kevin Rogers, a volunteer firefighter for the Rollins Fire Department. “I don't have much experience, I just kind of want to get a sample of everything there is to know."
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“This is the third year in a row that Lake County Fire Association has gotten together all of the fire departments across Lake County to do a spring training, wildland, urban interface exercise,” said City of Polson Fire Department Public Information Officer Jodi O’Sullivan.
“So together we have about 10 departments participating and close to 100 different firefighters across Lake County,” continued O’Sullivan.
Departments from Ronan, Finley Point, Rollins, St. Ignatius, the DNRC and Charlo-Moise all participated in the training, along with several others.
Crews started the morning by staging at the Ronan airport, being briefed on what their tasks would be and who they would be with.
“What they'll be doing is they'll be breaking into task force, mixing up crews from different departments and different assignments, putting people in roles that maybe they haven't been in before. And then they'll go out and there's a series of three different stations where they'll be doing stuff like structure protection, triage, map reading, communications,” O’Sullivan told MTN.
The departments all came together for the same reason: they all typically work with one another during the fire season.
“In the last several summers, we've had large wildland fires around here. Because we are a small county, we all end up doing mutual aid back and forth,” said O’Sullivan.
“We get to operate in different districts and see the train because there may be a chance that we get called out this summer to work with everybody. Always nice to have some mesh beforehand,” continued O’Sullivan.
But training goes beyond just getting their reps in.
“It really gives everybody just get a chance to shake down your equipment, make sure our radios work, make sure we know who's there. So that when you show up in another district, you see a familiar face,” said O’Sullivan.
