GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The Green Bay Metro Fire Department welcomed ten new firefighters on Friday.
The recruits officially graduated from an eight-week course by completing a series of demonstrations at the NWTC Public Safety Building.
“In the last eight weeks we have spent time covering our administrative policies and procedures, EMS responses, fire training – and fire training is broken down into three different subgroups- engine company operations, truck company operations, and one is special operations,” said Training Captain Jordan Waack. “This recruit academy consisted of ten people. We had some individuals who had 5-6 years of career fire experience from departments across Wisconsin, all the way to somebody who had just graduated last semester from the fire training program here at NWTC.”
The special operations include things like marine rescue tactics and techniques, among other things.
While the training is important for those fresh to the fire service, it’s also important for trainees like Kyle Reif to get up to speed. Reif previously served in Kaukauna’s fire department and was serving in Bellevue until the recent merger.
“A lot of it’s new because it’s the ‘Green Bay Way.’ Green Bay has been around for over 100 years, they do a lot of things right,” Reif told WTAQ News. “There’s a million ways to do a lot of things in the fire service and that’s why you have those SOG’s (Standard Operating Guideline) and SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedure), to go fall back on protocol, but they showed us a ton of information and we’re all just trying to learn and be the best we can be.”
“The Green Bay way is just just a way of describing how we perform tasks on the fire ground here with the City of Green Bay,” said Captain Waack.
While Reif might be familiar with how things typically work in the industry, he’s still working on learning all of the plays.
“The Green Bay Packers have a playbook, the Chicago Bears have a playbook. They’re both playing the same game, however everyone just approaches it a little differently,” Waack said. “The playbook is just how we do it here. That’s not saying that somebody else does it wrong or somebody else does it right, it’s how we perform here with the staffing resources we have.”
The next step for recruits like Reif is simply getting assigned their first shift and putting their skills to the test.
