Starting tomorrow, Friday, July 5th and running through the weekend to July 7th, Red Deer County Fire is offering a special camp called Ignite the Fire.
Drayton Bussiere, the Fire Chief for Red Deer County talks about the special camp.
"What we're doing is running a camp here at our training center in Red Deer County for females and gender diverse individuals. We're just taking the weekend to introduce a number of people to some basic firefighter skills. It (the camp) is targeted mostly for people who think they might be interested in a career in firefighting in the future. We are providing a safe place for them to do that."
On average, in North America, only 9% of all firefighters are female or gender diverse individuals. One of the reasons for the camp is to raise that number for Red Deer County. Bussiere says they County Fire Department is pretty close to that statistic of 9% as they have about 120 paid on call firefighters and 20 of those are women.
Bussiere talks about some of the things attendees would be learning.
"We're going to focus on the basic skills. The attendees are going to get some familiarization with the personal protective equipment we use, they're going to try their hands at some forcible entry and some hand line management. They're going to fight a fire from the outside so they can get a feel for what that's like. And they're going to do some basic skills in search and rescue. The goal is to give them a small taste of the things that they would learn in a full blown firefighter training program."
The camp this weekend is for ages 15-18, and there will be another camp for ages 19-30 coming up on August 9th to 11th. If you would like to register please email ignitethefire@rdcounty.ca