Firefighters are not bulletproof

YERMO - Area firefighters spent Thursday not learning how to save others from burning buildings but how to save themselves.

Firefighters from the Barstow Fire Protection District, the Daggett volunteer fire department and the Marine Corps Logistics Base fire department conducted drills to learn how to save themselves in dangerous situations on Thursday at the MCLB fire training tower.

"We're used to saving a lot of people, but we rarely think about saving ourselves," said Barstow fire engineer Travis Espinoza.

He said the training the firefighters went through is modeled after actual situations where firefighters across the country have been killed. One drill, which Espinoza called the "Denver prop," had the firefighters jump through a window as if entering the room of burning house. The firefighters then had to break out of the room using axes and squeeze through a small space. Other training included teaching firefighters how to follow a hose out of a house and different scenarios firefighters had to crawl through.

"We take their unfortunate situations and lear n from them so we don't repeat them," Espinoza said.

Donny Viloria, an instructor at the training from the San Bernardino County Fire Department, said the training puts firefighters in the situations they do not like to think about; where their lives are in danger. Many firefighters, he said, say that if they had to get out of a dangerous situation, they could. The training asks the firefighters to prove it.

"They're not bulletproof," he said. "We do a lot to get civilians out of their predicaments but we get ourselves into a lot of predicaments as well."