By Melanie Breault ‘11
ITHACA, NY— Hand over hand, Kara Cundy slowly made her way head first down the ladder. As Cundy stared at the ground 30 feet beneath her, she took one deep breath after another to prevent herself from throwing up.
“I am terrified of heights,” firefighter Cundy of the Big Flats Fire Department said. Cundy has been a firefighter for 10 years, but she still has not been able to overcome her fear of heights, until now. “I had to do it. I couldn’t chicken out in front of my chief.”
Cundy attended the Tompkins County Fire Training Division’s firefighter survival program Nov. 14 at the Tompkins County Fire Training Center on 200 Pier Road. This daylong course that teaches self-rescue and rescue of trapped firefighters is offered twice a year under the instruction of State Fire Instructor for the city of Ithaca Fire Department Tom Basher.
Basher has been an instructor and firefighter with the Ithaca Fire Department for 17 years and has been teaching this program for the past 15 years.
“People were getting killed,” he said, referring to the fire at Cornell University’s Alpha Psi fraternity on Dec. 6, 1906, where three volunteer firefighters were killed after a wall collapsed on top of them. “Had [those firefighters] had some knowledge or training in certain fields, they may not have had that same outcome,” Basher said.
The Tompkins County course is based on FDNY Battalion Chief John Salka’s “Training Your Firefighters to Get Out Alive” program. Salka created the program in 1995 after 11 New York City firefighters died in the line of duty in 22 months.
“Nine out of 11 of those firefighters were killed in a building they could have easily gotten out of had they had the proper training,” Salka said.
Salka is also the founder and president of Fire Command Training, an organization that provides lectures, workshops and hands-on training to fire service professionals around the country. Salka was awarded the Fire Engineering’s Training Achievement Award in March 2001 at the Fire Department Instructors Conference in Indianapolis for his firefighter survival program.
“I didn’t come up with this all on my own,” he said. “I took the skills I learned from other firefighters as well as my own situations and created a package. This [package] has become the model for so many different fire departments now.”
As the first step toward their career, Basher said potential firefighters must go to the New York State Academy for Fire Science in Montour Falls. Once they have completed the academy, they must attend specific firefighter training in Ithaca, which includes 90 hours of basic training as well as constant training throughout their careers, including mandatory attendance at the firefighter survival program.
“There are certain dangerous working conditions that are always constant [for firefighters],” Salka said. “I don’t know if these conditions will ever change, but through [the firefighter survival] training, we can diminish the number of fatalities and injuries per year.”
According to the National Fire Protection Association, 70 on-duty firefighters died in 2009 with 4.28 percent of those deaths caused by being caught or trapped at the scene. New York state made up the largest number with five on-duty firefighter fatalities.
“In actuality, not that many firefighters die from being trapped in a burning building,” Salka said. “But it still keeps happening and we are taking steps to diminish these numbers. There shouldn’t be even one.”
The training session Saturday featured 14 old and new firefighters from fire departments across the county including Big Flats, Lansing, Danby and Freeville. Some of the attendees have taken the course several times to improve their skills, while others like new firefighter, Liz McClure from the Freeville Fire Department, took this course for the first time.
“Fortunately, we don’t see that many fires, but then we don’t get much practice,” McClure said. “This training is good because when [a fire] does happen, we know exactly what to do to protect yourself and your team.”
