There are many perks to taking the pre-service firefighter training program.  How many people get to spend two days tearing cars apart with over powered hydraulic tools?  Well, that’s what I was up to this past Thursday and Saturday.  It was an awesome time!  We were at the GTAA fire training location at Pearson airport in Toronto.  This is a top notch training facility that has just about everything you could need.  While we were working on the far end of the lot we got to watch these massive airport fire trucks go through training exercises.  They have top mounted water cannons and they start drenching things before the truck stops moving.  We also got to do some international relations training.  The airport firefighters from Athens, Greece were in Toronto for training and during one of our breaks we got into a shirt swap with them.  So, I gave up a Seneca Fire shirt and got back a shirt from Greece!  The tools we used during training were a lot of fun, although they were pretty damn heavy.  You could literally cut through the metal on a car as if it was paper.  It was very therapeutic.  Here are some shots.

*One of my buddies using the hydraulic spreaders

*Another guy using the cutters

*We created a convertible

*We did it again…except this car was on it’s side

*This was my handy work with an air chisel.  The door was unlocked, but I figured it was more fun to open it this way.

*This is one of the massive airport fire trucks.

*Here it is in action

*Here is my Greek fire shirt

Tags: airport, athens, auto extrication, firefighter, gtaa, pearson, toronto, training

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