Montco Fire Academy Launches Summer Essentials Program

The Montgomery County Fire Academy started its Summer Essentials six-week daytime training program for volunteer firefighters for a second year with a new class of 26 students.

The program is designed to accommodate college students who wish to train as volunteer firefighters. Two students are military veterans, several work evenings, and one student is an operating-room nurse who works weekends at an area teaching hospital that does organ transplants. Students that successfully complete the program will have the opportunity to test for Firefighter I national certification.

All of these students have devoted six weeks of their summer to fire training so that they can protect and serve their communities as volunteer firefighters. The Pennsylvania Entry Level Firefighter curriculum consists of four courses: Introduction to the Fire Service, Fire Ground Support, Exterior Firefighter, and Interior Firefighter.

To the extent that students must successfully complete each course before they can begin the next course, the training is not unlike summer college courses with one exception: these students will be required to extinguish a structure fire in order to complete the program. Training starts daily at 8:15 a.m. and continues until July 12.