Week 4, 12 more
We're slowly getting to do more hands on things during the week. Earlier this week we had ladder day, the 35 foot ladder sucks. We learned how to carry victims down the ladder, that was pretty cool I was surprised by how easy it was. Near the end of the week we did more exercises with fire hoses, we got to advance a charged hoseline to the 2nd story using a ladder, I was expecting it to be a lot more difficult than it was. However, once we got around to using hose clamps that was another story, we had to change out a section of 3" hose pretending that it had "burst" and we had to replace it with two more sections of 3". The hose clamp was used to temporarily shut the water so that you could change the sections out. Yeah well, the hose clamp sucks. Especially with the only method I'm being shown to use it is to use your bodyweight to press it down. Uhh, small problem, I can't seem to accomplish that because the clamp literal pushes me back up every time I try to use my body weight. There was another guy in my group who's on the small side and weighs probably 20lbs more than me, he had a really tough time with it, finally got it at after fighting. They finally told me to go talk to one of our instructors for more ideas on techniques. That was rather discouraging, we used the clamp on the 2 1/2" and I didn't have a problem getting it down. And who uses 3" hose, let alone hose clamps? I asked here and they just laughed and said "a hose wha?"