Ultimate Team Builder: Air Hockey

If you live in Lower Moreland, then you’re already aware it’s not the biggest of  townships. But it’s quality over quantity, and The does a great job serving and protecting their neighborhoods on a daily basis.

Sometimes the calls just don’t come in, which is good in the grand scheme of things because it means the residents are safe and sound. But it also means a lot of downtown for the guys who ride the big red trucks.

So how do they like to pass the time?

Air hockey, of course.

The popular sports game is part of the recreation room at the Huntingdon Valley Fire Company, along with other forms of entertainment like a computer and a TV to keep our firefighters busy on slow days.

Not only do they get their physical activity out of the way by pushing the thin plastic puck across the board, but the rec room fills a vital role in building team chemistry. You usually only hear this term thrown around in sports dialogue, but in this example, that chemistry does a lot more than win a ballgame.

“It makes the place fun for people to hang out and it becomes like a little social area for our members,” said Sergeant JJ Weinstein, who has served for six years. “We become a group and really build camaraderie, like a brotherhood. On a real fire, the few that we get, I’m looking at the person next to me, and my life depends on that person’s training and trusting that person. If something goes wrong, I have to know that person is willing to get me out of there.”

Since the snow has cleared from the big winter storms a couple of months ago, it’s been a relatively slow period for the HV Fire Company. This year the ice wasn’t as bad to deal with and, as recently as last week, Lower Moreland avoided massive floods while other areas were not so fortunate.

“We lucked out this past week,” Weinstein said. “If (the storm) was a littler more east, we would have been under water, but luckily our town wasn’t under water at all. We came relatively close, but we would have needed a couple more hours worth of rain to really put us under water.

“This winter was like last winter,” Weinstein added. “We didn’t have a lot of big snowstorms, but we had those couple of very large snowstorms that generated a lot of calls for us. This year we had the same problems of finding the buried hydrants and finding our way around town.”

The slow seasons have become part of their routine. They know what parts of the season will be their busy time of year, and they know when there will be down time for more air hockey.

“For us as a fire company, a lot doesn’t change for us,” Weinstein said. “Our calls come in spurts, our fires come in spurts. We’ll get five fires in a month, and then we could go the rest of the year with nothing, as far as actual fires.”

Aside from the fun and games they may have in the station, the training these guys go through is rigorous.

They have to take a course that includes 200 hours of tough, hard, training. And that only enables them to ride on the truck. If you want to ride on the rescue truck with the Jaws of Life, that will run you about another 70 hours of training.