Our Trainers
Our trainers are some of the best in the industry. With all of them having 10+ years of firefighting experience, they’ll give a first-year firefighter all the tools and tricks to be success on their first day actually working on the hill. Fire is dynamic. Objectives, tactics and hazards often change day to day and assignment to assignment. In order to ensure Pacific Oasis crews are adequately informed on each day’s activities we use a variety of checklists and reference materials. Staying informed and maintaining our collective situational awareness is imperative to our crew’s wellbeing. When you train with us, you’ll learn how to be safe, be properly qualified for firefighting situations and how to work while having fun.
pacific oasis crew members
Due to the nature of the job, it attracts a certain type of individual. These are adventurous people who enjoy the outdoors, nature and our environment. People open to adventure, being physical, working hard and helping others.
When like-minded people get together it’s easy to make friends. Turns out it doesn’t much matter your race, religion, gender or any other defining trait, when you and your team throw down and stop a fire, meet objectives or just see something like a bear jump over a rattlesnake at sunset, it helps to create a bond. Firefighting with Pacific Oasis has an unlimited number of opportunities to create these bonds and those lead to great friendships.
getting prepared to fight fires
All wildland firefighters are required to take a 40-hour training program. This is a standardized nationwide program. It entails videos, lectures, and a day of field training. Every firefighter has to pass the Work Capacity Fitness Test or “the pack test” yearly. This is where you need to carry a 45 lb. pack for 3 miles in less than 45 minutes.
Beyond that, we encourage our firefighters to come and complete our provided Chainsaw Safety class as well as a Pump and Water handling class that helps firefighters understand how hand crews and engines work together. These 3 classes are a good start to understanding the tools you have at your disposal on a fire and how they can be used. We recommend that all new fire fighters take these 3 provided classes to begin with.
The fire environment is very dynamic. Staying focused and in the moment by maintaining our situational awareness is imperative to our wellbeing. All of our suppression actions are based on fire behavior. How will the fire respond to the fuels, weather, and topography? Fire behavior can be a very complex equation. How fuel, weather and topography align can change the fire behavior dramatically, which in turn changes our course of action. Our firefighters need to ask themselves, where will the fire go? What can it do? What will I do? What will I do if the wind shifts, and the fire comes towards me?
We post lookouts to observe weather and fire behavior. We maintain prompt communication with forces and adjoining forces. We establish escape routes and make them known. We identify safety zones that can be utilized if the fire activity picks up and it is no longer safe to be engaged in suppression. You have to have a plan all the time. We teach this all the time. The most important thing is to come home safe.
These are just a few of the risks involved in being a wildland firefighter. Due to the risk in the wildland fire environment, we need to implement our risk management process. How well our crews manage the risks associated with any day’s assignment directly corresponds with our success and wellbeing.
You’ll learn how to take in all this information with our instructors and then how to implement it on the hill.