All Clear - A Firefighter Health & Wellness Podcast
Paraguay Roadtrip Special!!
Jun 14, 2024Season 2Episode 15
Travis McGaha
🔥🔥 You Won't Believe What These Brave Firefighters Are Doing in Paraguay! 🔥🔥
Welcome to an explosive episode of All Clear Firefighter Wellness! We're bringing you exclusive interviews with heroic firefighters from the United Firefighter Training Network, a nonprofit dedicated to delivering cutting-edge training and equipment to underserved fire departments worldwide. 🌎🚒
This week, meet Gilberto Meza-Corral and his elite team as they gear up for a high-stakes mission to Paraguay, where they'll tackle high-rise fire operations with local heroes from across South America. From cancer prevention to mastering life-saving techniques without U.S.-standard equipment, discover how these firefighters are not just teaching but learning invaluable lessons from their Paraguayan counterparts.
Don't miss the riveting details of a five-story blaze without hydrants and the innovative solutions these pros devised on the fly! 🤯💧 Get ready for a firestorm of inspiration and bravery, and stay tuned for incredible stories and insights from their groundbreaking trip.
🔥🔥 You Won't Believe What These Brave Firefighters Are Doing in Paraguay! 🔥🔥
Welcome to an explosive episode of All Clear Firefighter Wellness! We're bringing you exclusive interviews with heroic firefighters from the United Firefighter Training Network, a nonprofit dedicated to delivering cutting-edge training and equipment to underserved fire departments worldwide. 🌎🚒
This week, meet Gilberto Meza-Corral and his elite team as they gear up for a high-stakes mission to Paraguay, where they'll tackle high-rise fire operations with local heroes from across South America. From cancer prevention to mastering life-saving techniques without U.S.-standard equipment, discover how these firefighters are not just teaching but learning invaluable lessons from their Paraguayan counterparts.
Don't miss the riveting details of a five-story blaze without hydrants and the innovative solutions these pros devised on the fly! 🤯💧 Get ready for a firestorm of inspiration and bravery, and stay tuned for incredible stories and insights from their groundbreaking trip.
You can contact us with questions, suggestions or just to say hi at our website allclearpodcast.com
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Speaker 1:
This is All Clear Firefighter Wellness, where we help you light your fire with it. Welcome to All Clear. We have a special episode for you this week. We're going to be interviewing quite a few firefighters from the United Firefighter Training Network. This nonprofit focuses on taking advanced training and equipment to countries that have a need and desire to learn what we often take for granted here in the US when it comes to the fire service. This special episode will introduce you to some of the team and understand about their upcoming trip to Paraguay. Our first interview will be with Gilberto Meza-Corral, who I have the privilege of working with here in Concord, here in North Carolina. So, Gilberto, it's good to sit down with you. I know that we're talking about you going to Paraguay with some other guys for a special project. Why don't you tell us, number one, who are you? Number two, what are you all doing?
Speaker 2:
I do appreciate the time that you gave us to share a little bit of our mission. As you said before, my name is Gilberto Mesa Corral and I'm one of the three founders of United Firefighter Training Network Corporation. This is a United States domestic nonprofit corporation. Our mission is simple it's to provide free training, free education and free equipment to fire departments or individuals that they don't have these resources. The purpose of this program is to ensure that they have the means to provide professional, effective and efficient fire service.
Speaker 2:
She got to be in Paraguay between July 27 and July 6 of this year, 2021. And our trip is sponsored by the Estepal Department and local authorities. The reason for this trip is to deliver an intensive course of training that will be focusing on high-rise operations. An intensive course of training that will be focusing on high-rise operations. Topic interventional team and fire apparatus, maintenance and operation. The fire instructors that we are traveling to Paraguay are Ignacio Villa and Gustavo Chavez from Indianapolis Fire Department, rene Soriano, philip Burris and myself, gilberto Meza, from City of Concord Fire Department.
Speaker 2:
This is in North Carolina. Yes, all these firefighters are a member of the United Firefighter Training Network Corporation. As I mentioned earlier, you will be delivered in a classroom and had scenarios to your brothers and sisters from Paraguay, argentina, brazil and Chile. The brothers and sisters from Paraguay, argentina, brazil and Chile Three of that city people already registered and this is going to be a three intensive training followed by two nights of in-the-house training for personal on-chip. We want to give a special thanks to the North Carolina Firefighter Cancer Alliance for allowing us to share their investigations and their program to create awareness on the cancer in the Far East area.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I know, when you start talking about countries outside of the US, when you start looking at Europe and places like that, things like you know advanced firefighting tactics, cancer prevention those things are very common. But when you start looking at other continents and other places, it's not as common. And it makes me happy to see that this information will be going down. But, gilberto, what will be your role in that time in Paraguay?
Speaker 2:
So my role is initially as a facilitator. I'm the little man, but also we have the duty to leave a better service than the way that we find it. So I'm going to be an instructor, sharing that information that I mentioned to you earlier on the cancer awareness. I want to be sure that at least one of my instructors that is 100% English-spoken. He doesn't speak nothing of Spanish. I mean, I want to be sure that the translation gets properly. I want to be acting as a safety officer and other than that, network, network, network and network. We go on with the intention of sharing our knowledge. We're not going with the attitude I'm going to teach you how we do in the United States, because that is not our intention. Our intention is just share knowledge and that's it. Trying to open the door for future training at least once a year.
Speaker 1:
And you know it's amazing. We may have advanced tactics, we may have advanced equipment, but there's still a lot we can learn when it comes to improvisation and ways to work around when we encounter problems that maybe we haven't seen before.
Speaker 2:
That is something that I didn't catch before and I'm not going to say this kind of funny, but it's a specific situation that happened in the city of El Este in February 2024. They had a high-rise fire Issued at the last day in February 2024. They had a high-rise fire, five stories on fire, from the floor 11 to the 16th. And guess what? They don't have the water system that we have here in the United States. They don't have standpipes, they don't have hydrants outside. So if you ask how they were able to control, well, they get a lot of water mobilization even in those concrete trucks that they moved concrete in the United States they were moving water over the water.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and drop tank operations are not easy, even when it's well-prepared.
Speaker 2:
I can only imagine fighting a high-rise fire doing that. No, so we got to be thinking out of the box. What is the water system collapse? What are our external resources? Who are our stakeholders or partnerships in our area? How can we make it efficiently? Because if we got a collapse on the water system, we are going to be affected all around those cities. So, yes, what I'm telling you? That we're not going to teach, no, but we're going to learn as well from them.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and you know I'm looking forward to kind of hearing what the follow-up is after you guys get back and see what points are learned and what you've taught them and kind of see what that interchange is. And you know, speaking for the cancer lives, we're very happy that you're taking our information down. We're looking forward to our word kind of going big time now, so to speak, going out into the country and we'll see how it goes. But you know, as we move forward, I now want to take time to interview some of the other guys, but Gabor, I want to thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:
Pietro, you enjoy it guys, and if you get any feedback, please, please, use the channels of communication of this podcast and give us your feedback. What channels of communication of this podcast? And give us your feedback. What would you like to know and learn about another country, specifically South America, Because you know what Travis these people are coming to the state. We got a floating community, we got immigration from another country and we need to know how those people behave during a fight environment. In that way, here we will be able to re-educate the rainforest or to make sense of their behavior, so they will be better, safe and united for the people, and it'll even go into community risk reduction.
Speaker 1:
It's amazing how all this plays out. But, gilberto, thanks for your time and, like I said, we're going to interview the other guys now and I'll look forward to it. Thank you much. Now we're going to be speaking with Gus Chavez, who is also from the Indianapolis Fire Department, about his role in this upcoming trip.
Speaker 3:
So my name is Gustavo Chavez. I go by Gus as well. You guys can call me Gus or Gustavo. So I've been on firefighting for 24 years. I just kind of want to give you guys a little background on where I'm from and what I've done. So I started off in a department just north of Indianapolis in a suburb called Fishers, indiana. I was there for five years before I came over to the big city of Indianapolis. I've been with Indianapolis for 19 years as an officer, for probably the last about 10 years, and I used to be at Station 7 with Nacho back in a few years back, and as you get promoted you kind of got to move, move around and you know, go, go to your open, open spots. So I was a private in Station 7 high-rise company on a tiller there for a while. Um, and then uh got promoted, went to another high-rise company down, uh, down the street there, and then uh, station seven opened up and Nacho was my engineer for a little while. So we took care of each other and uh, it was. It was a good time. But um, like I said, station seven is station 14.
Speaker 3:
In Indianapolis are the dive houses. We have heavy extrication, tax air. We do rope, confined space, rescue pretty much everything, every specialty but I've always been at tactical houses. I've always enjoyed that type of work High-rise.
Speaker 3:
I'm kind of curious and I think I'm interested to see what they do over there. I know I've seen some videos and it looks like they were doing tanker operations for some of the high-rise buildings that they were fighting fires on. So you know, of course, any tanker operations, even in a single residence home, it's just cumbersome, it just takes a lot of manpower and a lot of equipment. So imagine doing that here in the US with a high-rise building. I mean, it's just something that they have to do and I don't know. Hopefully we can give them some pointers and hopefully we can learn from each other. I'm curious to see what kind of techniques they use as well.
Speaker 3:
But yeah, so me and Nacho have been at high-rise companies, so we're going to go down there and try to help them out with some of those resources and maybe some of the training, and hopefully we can maybe give them some pointers and just help them out wherever we can, which is perfect, because so this month, um, before we go to go to Paraguay, we're actually going to do some high rise training, uh, so I'll be taking a lot of videos and, um, you know, we we did some, we ran through some stuff yesterday, so I mean it's all good, good things that we can learn and we can pass on to everybody. You know, every fire is different, every building is different, so different techniques, different ways of doing things. So always wanting to learn and pass on that information as well. But I'm looking forward to heading out to South America and just helping out wherever we can.
Speaker 1:
Now we're going to talk with another one of the firefighters from our crew, and this is going to be Ignacio Villa, who is from the Indianapolis Fire Department. My name is Ignacio.
Speaker 4:
All my friends call me Nacho that's what I go by, nacho, so feel free to call me that. I've been here with the Indianapolis Fire Department for over 17 years. I started early, so I may look young, but the I grew up with all the older guys that you know. They've been doing all their lives and now they're almost retired. So at least I can say I was fortunate enough to get some of that experience from them and honestly, the way they taught you back then to now is different. You know, they kind of threw you in there. It's a little burn so you can see what it felt like. So then you're like, hey, this section is pretty hot. But I've spent almost all my career downtown Indianapolis. I went regular at Station 7, which is a tactical station.
Speaker 4:
We do the rope, rescue, extrication, dive, and so basically we have all these high-rise buildings here and to me my high-rise buildings fires is bread and butter. We don't get them that often but we're always ready for them, right? People always say, hey, you getting any good fires? Well, I wish we did, but then again we're basically making sure that people are safe. So when we do get them, people are probably not going to be in the best decisions they want to be. So one of the things that I always tell people is we always practice and train to be ready, but every fire has different situations and basically you just have to be ready. I tell people. I said, when you get that red stone in there, you just have to figure out how to fix that problem.
Speaker 4:
The training that we want to offer to Paraguay is high rise training, and we may not live in Paraguay, but I think that the main point that we want to touch with this is if it's another tool in their toolbox that they can get and definitely help them. That's what we want to be able to do Provide more and more so they can effectively fight these fires whenever they get them. I know that here in the US we're very spoiled when it comes to water sources. We have hydrants everywhere, but with Indianapolis we have these old buildings that don't have hydrants I mean not the standpipes so we have to do different ways to get that water to them. Those kind of little techniques we can relate to Paraguay or all these Latin American cities that don't have those sources that we can still figure out ways to fight those fires and teach them those abilities to be able to do it With.
Speaker 4:
That said, it's not only fighting the fire, but we also have to be able to evacuate the people safely, because these high rise buildings have many floors and there's usually people in these floors, so we have to get everybody out and do all those things also effectively. Like Humberto and Rene mentioned, the red and all that stuff also plays an important role. So, when it comes to the high rise, tawana will take care of that, and then Humberto and Rene they're going to take care of the red, so they can also help out with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:
And finally, today we're going to be speaking with Rene Soriano, who is with the Concord Fire Department as well someone else I have the privilege of working with about what role he's going to have and how he's going to bring his experience from the rescue truck to Paraguay.
Speaker 5:
I don't know about specialists but yeah, like Travis said, my name is Rene Soriano. I've been in the fire service for about 16 years 12 years career there with the city of Concord, currently assigned to rescue 3 as the engineer so responsible for driving the truck, operating the truck, that stuff. So you know, being able to be part of the group and share the knowledge is an amazing experience, not only for the students but for ourselves, right? So we're going to be going in parallel to various topics, and one of them being Rick. So who does the firefighter call when they're in trouble? Right? When people are in trouble, right? When people are in trouble, they call Sorry.
Speaker 5:
When people are in trouble, they call the fire department. But when the firemen are in trouble, what do they call? Right? So it's up to us to be able to rescue ourselves or, if not, the team come rescue us, right? So we're going to be discussing and going over techniques of RIC Firefighter Self-Survival and we're excited to share the knowledge. And, like I said, it's going to be a winning for both parties, right, not just for the instructors but for the students. It's going to be a privilege for us to go and share the knowledge and see how they do things over there.
Speaker 1:
I hear it at All Clear privileged to be able to share part of this team's journey to Paraguay with you guys, and we look forward to learning how they're able to share knowledge and camaraderie with their brothers and sisters down there as well. So be sure to watch our upcoming episodes with results and stories from their trip to Paraguay. Thanks for listening to this special edition of All Clear and, as always, light your fire within. You have been listening to All Clear Firefighter Wellness. All Clear is presented by the North Carolina Firefighter Cancer Alliance. You can find out more about us at allclearpodcastcom. Leave us a message. We'd love to hear from you. If you like what you hear, tell someone. All opinions expressed on the podcast do not always reflect the opinions of the podcast. As always, light your fire within All Clear.
