Firefighters from multiple departments gathered at the East Liverpool Fire Department for a three-day Fire and Life Safety Educator Training provided by The Ohio Fire Marshal’s Office. (Photo by Kristi R. Garabrandt)

EAST LIVERPOOL –Firefighters from East Palestine, Edinburgh, Rome and Marlborough Townships joined with seven firefighters from the East Liverpool Department for a three-day (24 hour) Fire and Life Safety Educator training hosted by the East Liverpool Fire Department.

The training which was provided to the department as a free outreach program from the Ohio Fire Academy, held Wednesay-through-Friday, covers a wide variety of topics from resources available to the fire departments through the State Fire Marshal’s Office; how to instruct/teach fire safety prevention; being proactive in the community, public relations; and working with the media and more.

East Liverpool Fire Chief Antony Cumo said the class is the basis of teaching the firefighters to teach different age groups such as children, organizations and nursing homes, about fire prevention/safety.

Cumo noted that the class is state-certified training for which the firefighters will be certified and will have to do continuing education classes for the next three years to keep the certification.

A big advantage to the training Cumo said was the networking the firefighters get to do with the fire marshals. He noted there are many services/programs they have discovered that are free and available to them through the Fire Marshal’s office including a program for teaching second and third-grade students for which the State of Ohio was the pilot for the program.

Cumo says his department will be looking into the program which will allow the firefighters to get into the schools for several days and work with the students and make them feel like they are “fire investigators” and talk to them about working smoke detectors and ehome exit plans.

He said the hope is that the students will go home to the adult in the household and asking if the smoke detectors work or if they have smoke detectors in the home. The students may then come back and say there are no smoke detectors in the home which will give the firefighters the ability to utilize some of what they learned in the class to get free smoke detectors and get them into homes that do not have them by contacting the adult in the house and telling them they have free smoke detectors and they can come install them.

“It is a good class and it’s great networking with these people, because when you have these instructors come teach, you share contact information and your able to give them a phone call and say hey what was that in class or what was that resource we were talking about and things like that,” Cumo said. “You’re able to lean on people and we have learned that over the past year or so with getting more people certified as fire inspectors. It’s nice to be able to form those.”

The training will also help with the fire department’s insurance rating.

“In the grand scheme of things what it does, is help us with our insurance rating as a fire department because right now we are lucky enough that Bill (former Fire Chief Bill Jones) got us to a four on a scale of one-to-10 on the ISO (International Organization for Standardization),” Cumo said. “We were able to get into the four with Bill in his last go around with it, we were in the low fours, closer to a three and the goal is to get this reassessed eventually and get down to a three.”

Cumo said that the department is in the first of the three years that will be looked back on for evaluation of the ISO rating. He has someone coming in October to meet with him and go over what the department is doing right and what can be done to improve things so they are on track for the ISO rating of three he desires.

Cumo noted that the lower the number on ISO Scale the better you are. He also said it been a little tricky getting that rating down with what they have to do and it takes a lot of organization, but it keeps them on track and pushes them to do more training which makes them a better department for the community.

He also said that there is a benefit to the community because going from a four to a three on the ISO rating scale will save homeowners a little bit of money on their homeowner’s insurance because a lot of the insurance is based on a fire department’s rating and it helps with savings in business and commercial insurance and it gives the community a better fire department. The lower a rating is on the ISO scale the better the fire department.

Cumo noted that training like this will go toward the 200 hours of training the firefighters are required to have every year and help with the ISO rating and help the community in multiple ways.

Lt. Alex Estell just completed Basic Fire Investigation and will be heading back next month to complete the advance Fire Investigation training which will give the department the ability to say they have a qualified investigator to determines causes of fires.

“Larger things we will call the state fire marshal — in for smaller things like food on the stove, kitchen fires, or dryer on fire, something smaller, we will be able to have somebody here say here is a state certification, here it is,” Cumo said.

Cumo wants to let the public know that the fire department currently has free smoke detectors provided by the Elks which they will install free in homes in need.

He said that it’s surprising the number of house fires they respond to where there were no working smoke detectors, and how this education is an important piece of fire prevention/safety for the community. He recalled a recent house fire where there was no working smoke detector and how if the father hhad not awakened when he did and been able to awaken children sleeping downstair in time the whole family could have been lost in the fire. He also said fire department is now working with the water department to include a message to customers reminding them to check their smoke detectors as a way of getting the message out to every household in the city.

kgarabrandt@mojonews.com