Brooklyn Park Firefighter Cadet Academy
“They don’t have any idea what they’re gonna be facing, and it’s very similar to what happens on the street, when our alarms go off we don’t know what the call’s gonna be,” Deputy Fire Chief Jovan Palmieri talks about the cadets of the Brooklyn Park Firefighter Cadet Academy during Skills Week, “We have cardiac arrest scenarios where they’re running medical calls, we also have live fire scenarios where we have simulated victims that need to be rescued, uh we also run vehicle crash scenarios, and they have to work on extricating a patient from the vehicle.” Skills Week is the culmination of training for Brooklyn Park’s new Firefighter Cadet Academy, where cadets, most of whom have no previous firefighting experience, go through 6 months of intensive training, learning from the very firefighters they’ll be working with after graduating. As Palmieri says, “We really want them to learn from us, learn the way we do things here in Brooklyn Park. We have very experienced firefighters on the streets right now, who are gonna become mentors, and who are gonna continue to train our cadets once they’re on the street, and we just want them to really be familiar with how we run things here in Brooklyn Park, and have really a connection to the city.” Cadet Kali Kaczmarek adds, “We have got the most incredible training. We just finished up an EVOC course, which is emergency driving, we do SCBA skills confidence courses, which is like confined spaces, we do specialty rescue courses, we’ve done repelling, we’ve done every type of fire drill you could think of, all the medical training you could think of. Every day is jam packed, for 24 weeks we’ve had nothing but training.” And that training creates a strong sense of teamwork among the cadets. Kaczmarek goes on to say, “Growing up I didn’t really do sports, I didn’t really have a team, um but this is a team.” Says Cadet Sam Kitzmann, “We do things in teams. We always have this rule, we call the 2 in, 2 out rule, um so we never go onto a job, or an event, or a fire event without at least our buddy with us.” Deputy Chief Palmieri adds, “None of us can do this job alone. We count on each other in high stress environments, and we really build a sense of teamwork into the academy. The cadets are given challenges they need to complete that are not possible without working together as a team.” The inaugural team of 8 cadets is now graduated, but that doesn’t mean their training is over. According to Palmieri, “they’ll be working as an extra person initially on the firetrucks, so they can continue their on the job training with mentors, and then after their one year probationary period they will be able to work as a firefighter for Brooklyn Park.” For more information about the Brooklyn Park Fire Department, or its Firefighter Cadet Academy go to http://www.BrooklynPark.org/Fire. Cadet Kaczmarek sums it up, “It’s really been life changing, because I’ve learned so much, and at the same time got to experience it along side 7 other tremendous people.”
