Strucutral Program History
The JointFire structural firefighting training program began in 2006 with a cooperative agreement between the Four Mile, Gold Hill, and Sugar Loaf, and Sunshine Fire Protection Districts. Sugar Loaf has since decided not to actively participate in the program.
The program was designed to address a number of key shortcomings:
- Quantity of training: An individual department, especially a smaller, more rural department, is often faced with the daunting task of making training available in dozens of specialty skill sets. Effective education in even one perishable skill set (pump operations and hydraulics, for example) may require upwards of 10-20 hours each year.
- Interoperability: Personnel from different departments on incidents requiring mutual aid/multiple-agency responses often have trouble interfacing effectively, often due to the lack of opportunities to work or train together.
- Quality of training: Smaller departments often draw from a proportionally smaller pool of qualified instructors, proctors, and assistants. Thus, many have difficulty consistently delivering high-quality training.
- Resource utilization: Not unlike the lack of instructors, smaller agencies tend to find themselves unable to easily obtain key training resources, such as props, tools, apparatus, training facilities, exercise locations, instructional materials, teaching aids, and personnel, especially for staff-intensive activities, such as live burns.
- Tracking, compliance, and information management: It is exceptionally difficult to manage the information generated and necessitated by training frequently. For each course, data must be captured regarding attendance, performance, and topics covered, not only to create a documentation trail for legal purposes, but to ensure staff compliance with educational minimums and established competency requirements.
- Current trends: Many agencies quickly find themselves unable to deal with the volume of information available regarding emergency services training, especially when it comes to new solutions, techniques, and technologies. Too often, they are struggling just to maintain their current system and don’t have time to investigate new ones.
- Duplication/economics: Clearly, a system in which each agency needs to develop, implement, and maintain its own training program, despite the fact that a neighboring agency may already be doing the same, is wasteful of time, energy, and taxpayer dollars.
With centralized administration and support provided by BES, the cooperative program is beneficial in a number of ways:
- Quantity of training: By pooling the resources of all participating agencies, the Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will provide a large number of training opportunities each year. Based on a rotating training schedule, upwards of 50 sessions each year are possible, far more than any one department might be otherwise able to accomplish.
- Interoperability: The Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will allow personnel from multiple jurisdictions to work closely on a regular basis, and the communication, workflow, and efficiency benefits will be immediately noticeable on multi-agency incidents. In addition, the program will incorporate and employ the key components of the National Incident Management System, helping the participating agencies to achieve the NIMS compliance status that is so critical for grant eligibility.
- Quality of training: By utilizing instructors from each participating agency, the Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will ensure a consistently high quality of education. Instructors will teach in their areas of expertise, and outside specialists will be invited to teach as needed.
- Resource utilization: With a larger number of participants, staff-intensive trainings are more realistic, and because multiple agencies will be positively impacted, better educational resources and facilities will be available. The Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will make use of the resources available from all participants, creating a better educational environment.
- Tracking, compliance, and information management: The Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will include information management services to monitor the training and certification status of all participants, as well as make attendance, performance, and compliance data available to agency representatives. By utilizing a web-based interface, available form any internet connection, training participants and instructors will have access to training schedules and personal progress information, and authorized users will have access to a suite of robust monitoring and reporting capabilities. In addition, online educational systems will be available for students to access course information both in advance of classes and well after course completion for pre-reading and refresher purposes. Online-only education options for specific topics are available as well.
- Current trends: Because the Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program will employ a dedicated staff member, the participating agencies benefit from having a training coordinator available to research current issues and techniques in fire, rescue, and EMS.
- Duplication/economics: Clearly, by consolidating the training plans of a handful of departments into a unified, cohesive program, each participating agency saves time and money by not duplicating systems. The Boulder County Consolidated Fire Training Program offers a single-source, high-quality solution to the issue of training fragmentation and offers great promise to participating departments and to the communities they serve.