THE BEST TRAINING POSSIBLE

were offset and accommodation was set to single occupancy. The course ran smoothly, and was even prepared to respond when one of the students received news that they were a close contact and had to isolate. We had accommodation put aside ready for them to use and passed them training material to bide their time. Eventually the individual was sent to a quarantine facility.

All of our instructor staff had had their first dose of vaccinations and many of the students had as well. Running concurrent courses posed some additional forethought into keeping cadres separate, but we have a strong COVID response plan in place if anyone (instructors included!) were to come down with symptoms. We were also trialling the introduction of a wellness dog in our evening mentoring sessions, in the hopes that belly scratches would help ease some of the anxiety of the pandemic.

Once the craziness of the courses subsided, the plan was for Hinton Training Centre staff to continue to review and upgrade our training materials. Some courses are great candidates for asynchronous delivery, and work is already underway to convert more of these for a larger training audience. Self-paced learning helps us get better at selfmotivation and improves technical online skills. Other courses like the wildfire crew member and crew leader still really need a live instruction component, based on the feedback from our students from 2020. This winter, our training specialists will be looking at combinations of synchronous and asynchronous delivery for a number of our longer courses. The suite of new virtual training tools out there is enormous and exciting; we’re going to be busy upgrading regardless of the pandemic and striving to embracing some of this new technology to train the next generation of firefighters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelsy Gibos has been a wildfire training specialist with Alberta Wildfire for two years. Gibos previously worked as a wildfire management specialist, calculating wildfire risk at the landscape level. Most of Gibos’s career has been science-based; she has worked as a fire researcher in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and completed a MSc in forestry while studying topographical effects on fire behavior.

FIRE AND THE FUTURE

Researchers learned that locally tailored social science can foster needed transformations in local and regional conversations about new, sustainable pathways toward reducing wildfire risk to communities.

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