Uniform training for successful cooperation

The training is not a one-sided conveyance for the instructors. Rather, they themselves are both teachers and learners. With each course, they gain additional information that may be relevant to their training activities: They learn a lot about possible errors in reconnaissance, search & rescue, firefighting and they experience how individual firefighters react to the challenging scenarios in tunnels. Despite this diversity, it is their task to limit themselves to the essentials, because practice as a benchmark obliges them to simple, comprehensible processes and explanations.

In this area of tension between individual support and uniform training, details in conveyance can shift over time. This is another reason why all courses are accompanied by full-time instructors from the International Fire Academy. «We define a benchmark for how we want the training to be. And then we keep our eyes and ears open with each training and assess whether the focus of each lesson is properly taught,» explains head of training Marianne Wernli. This is particularly important with regard to a possible deployment: If the procedures are coordinated, and even members of another fire service can be expected to take certain actions in a complex tunnel operation, this contributes to the safety and confidence of all emergency personnel.

Another goal of the QTC is to systematically expand the background knowledge of the instructors so that they can also answer more far-reaching questions and explain correlations. Therefore, every QTC has a specialist programme. As far as possible, topics related to road and railway tunnels are taken up. This year, for example, an excursion took place to the third tube of the Belchen tunnel, the so-called A2 renovation tunnel Belchen, between Eptingen (canton Basel-Landschaft) and Hägendorf (canton Solothurn). «Afterwards we drove to Basel to the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) emergency service department and had various safety devices and operational details on locomotives, as well as passenger coaches explained to us,» said Marianne Wernli.