Fayette County firefighters prepare for the upcoming school year

GAULEY BRIDGE, WV (WVNS) – Firefighters were training a little differently in Fayette County.

Eight different fire departments in Fayette County gathered at the Fayette County Firefighters Training Center for a training on August 10, 2024.

Some were there for certification; others were there to brush up on their training ahead of the school year.

West Virginia Public Service Training Instructor Cody Carr told 59News about one of the stations at this training center.

“So over here today we have a bus set up on its wheels. We can do a couple different scenarios with that, whether it is a rear lift, to roll the vehicle, to lift it off of a vehicle that has overrun it or underrun it, as well as lifting the front; if someone were to be stuck underneath or something we need to get out,” said Carr.

Boomer Fire Department Fire Chief Mike Myers added, “It is not your typical vehicle that we deal with in most cases. We want to make sure that everything is stable. So if we have to board a bus to get a passenger child out, we are not putting them at risk anymore [because] it not stabilized and moving while we are trying to work.”

This is not only beneficial training for school buses, but also for buses of the different tourist attractions. Many outdoors businesses in Fayette County use buses for their services.

This training center offers much more than bus extraction.

“To keep up with all the new skills and everything that firefighters are doing, our training center which opened in 2020 is a broad span of what we teach our firefighters,” said John McGinnis, the Vice President of the Fayette County Firefighters Training Center.

The training center facilitators recently brought in a new tanker for railroad training.

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