The week-long training was offered by Emergency North Training (ENT) through their annual event, FireCon.
Hundreds of career and volunteer firefighters from various regions of northwestern Ontario were in Thunder Bay this week to take part in critical firefighter training.
The week-long training was offered by Emergency North Training (ENT) through their annual event, FireCon.
Thunder Bay Fire Chief and ENT president Dave Paxton, said the event is supported through partnerships with Thunder Bay Fire Rescue, the Office of the Fire Marshal, the City of Thunder Bay Tourism Development Fund and the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs.
"[The Office of the Fire Marshal] sent 30-plus instructors here this week to help us offset these courses and really deliver a quality program over the week," Paxton told CBC Thunder Bay.
"There's a number of five-day courses, four-day courses and three-day courses all driven toward certification in the fire world."
Course offerings included extracting passengers from vehicles, hazardous materials operations and live fire attack among others.
This year FireCon also saw two pilot courses being put on by the Ontario Fire College — incident command and exterior attack.
"This is largely a volunteer fire service event, so we have people from Chapple, Kenora, Clearwater, Greenstone, Schreiber, Fort Frances all the way around," Paxton said.
Brent Harris, a volunteer firefighter from Dorion, Ont., said he joined the department because of "the community service piece — a small community, tight-knit community, just people looking out for each other, like minded people."
Harris said he was particularly interested in the live fire attack course, adding that it's an "opportunity you don't get all the time, so it's nice to be invited."
"We might have one, two calls a year, so being able to go through some of this stuff, in case something ever does come up, it's super helpful to have," added Harris, who's been with the department for a year and a half.
"We were just doing some survival skills and I was explaining to someone in there that I'm pretty claustrophobic, so getting the opportunity to run through a drill — that's not something I would force myself to do, but being here, it's nice to," Harris told CBC News.
A positive impact on municipalities
Ontario Deputy Fire Marshal John McBeth said FireCon is one of their largest training opportunities in the north.
"We're doing … a whole bunch of courses and really centralized here in Thunder Bay, bringing a whole bunch of departments into one location and training over the course of a week, which is definitely going to have a positive impact on municipalities," McBeth said.
He said the impact of the training is "huge," noting that participants are not only training with members of their own departments, "but they're also training with some of their neighbours across Ontario and that's vital. The opportunity to train with students from different communities is important."