North Bay Fire and Emergency held a hazmat training exercise at Ecole Secondaire Publique Odyssee to ensure that when a chemical leak happens, the crew will be ready.
“We’re upgrading a bunch of members to hazardous technician,” explained North Bay Fire Chief Jason Whiteley. “With a technician level, all the skills are offensive which means they will go into the hazard zones, execute rescues, they will cap the leak and get the spills.”
The scenario for the exercise was a chemical leak at a wastewater facility and included one victim which closely mirrored a real-life scenario that the North Bay crew responded to last year.
“Last year we had a leak at our wastewater plant dealing with Chlorine,” Whiteley stated. “The difference is we didn’t have a victim. We put enough safeguards in at the plant that we were fortunate to not have a victim, but this is a very real scenario.”
“We always expect hiccups but that’s the best way to learn,” Whiteley said. “Bonus of this training is that North Bay is leading the training but we have members of Thunder Bay Fire and Rescue and Peterborough Fire Services participating with us so if we did have a large scale emergency in the province we could be working together so to work with our partners is a success.”
After today’s exercise, 18 members of the fire services crew will hold the technician level. According to Whiteley, the rest of the department is at the operations level which is the base level, and a few crew members are at the mission-specific level which gives you technician level skills but not at the technician level.