THUNDER BAY — With a focus on remembering lives lost during 9/11, FireCon held a memorial stair climb.
Firefighters and trainees attending FireCon have the option to participate in a replication of the 110-flight stair climb that firefighters made on that day, he said.
“It just shows that we never forget. It's still something that is at the heart of what we do, and we remember the service,” said Dave Paxton, Chief of Thunder Bay Fire Rescue.
“There are a lot of people who changed that day, their lives changed, and it'll never be the same, and our service changed, and it's something that shows that people still connect to it.”
Staff and students alike were prepared for the climb during multi-day event, he said.
“It's great to see that everyone can share their experiences from different communities and different backgrounds,” he said.
“When they leave here, they take so much away back home, and then they share it again with their services back home, so it just continues. It’s awesome.”
Without the help of the Ontario Fire College and rural and remote communities, FireCon’s 9/11 memorial stair climb wouldn’t have been possible, he said.
“The fire college is a good example; they sent over 30 instructors here this week to help support,” he said.
“Departments like Lappe, Neebing, Dryden, and Kenora sent equipment, including pumpers, because it's always nice to train on the equipment you're going to use when you go back home,” he said.
Noting that not one community has it all, Paxton said its important for communities in Northwestern Ontario to unite for fire safety.
“As a team, it all comes together and brings all the equipment together in order to train, meet these certifications, and these performance requirements within the job,” he said.
“This event is always nice to have people outside of our department engaged with our members.”
Paxton said staff in the city have been preparing FireCon for the last nine months, he said.
“Staff's always happy to support this, we're lucky and fortunate that we have the training center here and we do a lot of our training in-house at the office of the Fire Marshall,” he said.
Chris Rennie, lead instructor for FireCon’s fire investigation program, said he's thrilled with how far the students have come.
“Coming in, they are actually terrified, and then by today, you can see the smiles on their faces and they're actually putting all the puzzle pieces together on how to do this together,” he said.
“It's rewarding to see that they learned how to do it and they know how to do it.”
This year, the five-day-long event happened to line up perfectly for a 9/11 memorial, Paxton said.
“Usually, FireCon was a week earlier, so we thought it'd be fitting to add something as an option in order to recognize the events that happened,” he said.
The event kicked-off on Tuesday, with hundreds of students and educators gathering for a wide range of training and other events at the Thunder Bay Fire Rescue Training Centre, Gary's Towing, and the Valhalla Hotel and Conference Centre.