Fifty-five firefighter-hopefuls started training this week at the Cincinnati Fire Drill School. Friday morning, next to Station 29 at Liberty and Linn, dozens of recruits were exercising, carrying air tanks as they ran across the lot, hitting giant tires with sledgehammers or listening to a veteran talk.
District Chief of Training Hugh Hains says each recruit had to climb an extended ladder.
"We can talk theory a lot but when you get your hands on it and there's nothing between the ground and you but a ladder 100 feet up and it's breezy, you get to make a decision whether this is something you want to do or not."
Hains says they don't want recruits to wash out, and have lots of experienced firefighters on hand to help with the training.
This is another large class. The last batch had 53 rookies.
"Traditionally, we're set up to run about 40 recruits through at a time, but we've gone through a period with a lot of retirements, and staffing is low," Hains says. "We have 55 recruits in this class."
Recruits must be between 18 and 41 years old.
"Other than that we try really, really hard to get a very diverse mix of folks in the recruit class: males, females, folks of various backgrounds, various races," he says. "There's a broad mix."
He says there is no "average" recruit.
"The goal is that the fire department will demographically reflect the city of Cincinnati. So we try really hard to get a diverse mix."
Hains says even if a recruit has previous experience as a firefighter, they must go through the department's training. "They can take our test, and they can sign up to be Cincinnati firefighters," he says. "There's a lot of folks on the Cincinnati Fire Department who were firefighters elsewhere, but every single one of them starts Day One in recruit training with everyone else.
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"[That's] one thing that kind of unifies everybody — everybody on the fire department, everybody you fight a fire with, everybody you make a medical run with, started in the same classroom, went through the same things with the same group of people. We're kind of proud of that."
The training lasts 21 weeks. Graduation for this class is expected in early November.
To see more photos of the firefighters training, click the image at top.
