Portable Firefighter Survival Maze

Throughout the fire service, training divisions are always looking for new and exciting ways to deliver quality training to their firefighters. With all our day-to-day activities (e.g., emergency responses, apparatus maintenance issues, staffing problems) and the cost of fuel, it’s not always practical to rotate crews through the training division to receive this training. Here’s a relatively economical way to take training to the firefighters. Cobb County (GA) Fire and Emergency Services designed a portable maze that provides quality firefighter training right in the apparatus bay. Many departments have constructed similar mazes at their stations or on their training grounds, but most of them are permanent fixtures. Although we used many of their ideas to construct our maze, we found a way to make ours portable (photo 1).

Using a pickup truck and a 12- × 6-foot enclosed trailer, our training division delivers the maze to a central station in one of our battalions, where it can be set up in less than 30 minutes. After we set it up, we give a few battalion officers a class on how to use the maze, and they are ready to go. Our battalion chiefs and captains handle all the scheduling for their battalions and coordinate their own training. There are roughly 150 people per battalion. Once everyone in the battalion has completed the training, usually in three to four weeks, we pack it up and deliver it to the next battalion.

迷宫旨在培训用户以消防员生存的基础知识。每位消防员仅在迷宫中爬行，带有漆黑的脸部，一个完整的气缸，并用他的装备与大火一样排列。受训者无法从响应期间通常携带的口袋中删除任何物品，以使他们的迷宫更容易。