VIDEO: Dozens of firefighters from around the Siouxland area, and beyond, spent their weekend learning and practicing what to do when commercial vehicles get into major accidents.
Starting on Friday, firefighters from Le Mars, Hinton, and Sioux City gathered outside the City of Le Mars with an organization called Crossroads Training to learn how to handle accidents with vehicles like semis and school buses. “We spend the first day sitting up and building skills, so we give them a skill set, we teach them the skills that they need to be able to complete complex scenarios, and then the second day, we set up those complex scenarios and put them through those scenarios and allow them to practice those and be able to become proficient at it,” said John Shackelford, the owner of Crossroads Training.
Sunday was the final day for training, where firefighters put all their knowledge to the test. “We have a concrete mixer overturned on a car, we have a school bus overturned on a car, we have a car underneath a semi, and they’re all smushed, smushed together in a very small area. So we’re going to work on in concert with the wreckers and the rescue personnel to support these vehicles. There’s a five-step process that we go through when we’re dealing with heavy vehicles on how we do the extra stations, and we’ll be working and setting those scenarios up. And then they have to work those scenarios to prove to us that they learned everything that we taught them on the first day,” said Shackelford.