Wildland Engine Academy and Sawyer Class

This weekend Box Elder County hosted the Wildland Engine Academy. Its open to everyone, not just Box Elder. We had people from Weber, Box Elder, Cache and Rich County. That coverage area is called the "Bear River District"

Dusty (Chris's cousin) is the State FMO over that area. He partners with Box Elder County Fire and they put on the training. 

We were broken into 3 different divsions. Each division had a task force leader. Our leader took us to each station (there were 4 total) and we trained with the same group. 

The first thing we went over was wildland structure protection.

In this scenario we were given a structure and a sprinkler kit. It was a bunch of hose, 6 sprinkler heads, a water tank and a pump. Our goal was to as quickly as possible set up a protection plan that saved the house and shed. Something we could set up and leave before the fire got there.

 From there we moved out to the next place. 

 I was with Todd in his truck because he was there as a warden

 This is just ONE group

 Our next assigment had 3 complex parts. First was ignitions (lighting a fire for a backburn)

Having a moving holding line behind it.

And then a pump and roll behind that.

I was in charge of holding so I didnt rotate and took care of the holding crews. The participants took turns in each position.

 Our next station was drafting. We drafted out of the snap tank. Then we went down to a relay race. Our first task was we had to stretch out 300 ft of hose (200 ft one side and 100 ft the other side) so we went all the way around a house and touched nozzles. Then we had to roll up our hose as fast as we could and put it back on the truck. As soon as it was on the truck time stopped.  Then we had to go to another house where we had to do the same thing (run around it) and have water flowing. When our streams crossed and nozzles time stopped. We felt pretty confident with our times. We hauled butt!! Rilee had to join our team because she was by herself. Teams ranged from 2-4 people. 

After that we went back up to the groups drafting  and helped them finish.

 Once the last team finished drafting and headed down to the relay race we tore down the snap tank.

We sent Rilee and Richard inside to hold it up for us.

 By this time it was 4pm. We started at 8 that morning. We headed down to the church to do our AAR. We filled the church parking lot with fire trucks.

 They also announced the winners of the relay race. They said average times were 4-7 minutes. The winning team had 1:48 and 2nd place team had 2:59. We were like wholly crap those are some good times...

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Well...

 We were the winning team!

 

 If that wasnt enough fun and fire excitement for a weekend Todd and I had saws class Sunday. Chris was supposed to be there too but he was on call warden for the county so he had to stay. 

We went up to Paradise to cut some trees up a canyon.

 Even though we were up a canyon it was so freaking hot.

I had to certify as a level 3 sawyer (beginner) and Todd had to recert as a level 2 (intermediate)

They broke us all out into teams. Todd was our instructor. There were a ton of level 3's. Thankfully we had a lot of instructors to so we could have good student to teacher ratio. We had a 2:1. It was perfect! We each had to fell (cut down) 3 trees, buck up trees 3 times and limb trees. Nathan from Lewiston was in my group. We had probably 20+ people cutting up there. We took down old dead trees in a heavily wooded area as part of a management plan for the land owner.

 We finished about 230 and had to wait for about half of the other groups to finish.

 Everyone from Willard Fire that was up there

Chase, Me, Taylor, Todd and Van