Two national experts on firefighter safety were at the Vermont Fire Academy Saturday sharing what they know with leaders in the state’s firefighting and emergency services community.
“The entire class today is focused on firefighter health and safety,” Chief Craig Haigh, a 36-year veteran of the Hanover Park, Illinois, Fire Department, and a field staff instructor at the University of Illinois Fire Service Institute. “It’s looking at it not from the standpoint of, we’re going to buy you new protective equipment or we’re going to give you a different type of fire truck, it’s an analysis of what actually goes on inside of the body physiologically when we expose the body to the job we do.”
Teaching alongside him was Denise Smith, professor of exercise science at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and a research scientist at the University of Illinois Fire Service Institute.