The North Judson-Wayne Township Fire Department is stepping up its training efforts.
Fire Chief Joe Leszek told the town council Monday that eight firefighters are set to begin EMT training. “It’s about a 40-hour course and it will test out in LaPorte,” he explained. “At the end of that, they will be certified EMTs. If they wanted to run a rig for Starke County, they’d be qualified and certified to do that. So that will be a big plus for us at that time. Then we’ll have at least eight certified EMTs on our department, two paramedics. So almost half of our department will be certified in some sort of medical field.” He said the department’s been emphasizing medical training, due to the recent increase in medical calls.
Meanwhile, Leszek says the department’s captains have been taking part in various types of training recently. “Since February, we have actually done mock structure fires to work on locating addresses, truck placement, and establishing water supply,” he said. “We’ve done blood-borne pathogen awareness training. We went out to Lutheran Air stationed out of Starke County Airport, and we did a new Medivac training with them and actually did hot load training with the chopper running.”
Leszek also reported the department’s new brush truck is in. “It’s been well-received so far,” he said. “I want to thank the town and the township for all the help getting that. Us getting the quotes and the way we did that truck, if we would’ve just called the company and had them build that truck, we were looking at about $140,000.”
He said the method was so effective, the Medaryville Fire Department is now using it to buy a new brush truck at a more affordable cost.
