Our Team has worked for several years now with the Center for Firefighter Behavioral Health headquartered at MUSC in Charleston. From providing members of our Team and others to be filmed in training videos, to having our Executive Director serve as a member of the Center’s development team, we are honored to be a part of such an important venture. The training modules that are created at the Center are available online at www.CFFBH.org through a partnership with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation throughout the country and the world.
The CFFBH Team is staffed by many talented people who give their time and expertise at MUSC to make this program available to our firefighters and their families. One of these people is Yulia Gavrilova who is on the Clinical Psychology Research Faculty at MUSC. She brings her expertise to the Team to help write and develop programs to be offered online to our firefighters.
Yulia expressed an interest in visiting firehouses to meet firefighters and to learn more about their culture and work environment. Today, our Executive Director Gerald Mishoe accompanied Yulia to visit several firehouses to interview firefighters to learn more about them. First, we visited Charleston Fire Department’s 2 & 3 House where Firefighters Ben Eaton and Ryan Criscio gave us an amazing tour of the old 1887 firehouse. She saw first-hand the quarters where these guys live during their twenty-four shifts and learned there is something special about being a part of history and serving in this historic firehouse. While there, the tones dropped for a fire West of the Ashley, so even though it was unplanned, we were off to give Yulia a firsthand look at firefighters at work.
Later, we traveled to North Charleston Station 2 to give her an opportunity to see a new age firehouse, complete with individual bunkrooms, a commercial grade kitchen, lots of floor space for multiple apparatus, and finishing with a blazing fast trip down the spiral slide. Once again, we were taken through the facility under the able guidance of Firefighter Josh Otero.
We finished the afternoon with a ride through the CFD‘s Training Center and grounds where she saw the tower, burn building, classrooms, and the multiple training props available to our firefighters.
Special thanks to Ben, Ryan, and Josh who provided our guidance today. And thank you to Yulia, who has committed herself to the future of our programs.