Larry Davis, a longtime fire service member and instructor, believes that rural fire, rescue and emergency medical responders are the first responders to virtually any emergency in the vast majority of North America. The need to deliver much-needed training to this widespread community resulted in the creation of the Rural Firefighting Institute, a not-for-profit institute dedicated to the improvement and advancement of fire prevention and control for small, rural and remote fire departments.

RFI will host the National Rural Firefighting Training & Operations Exposition May 31 — June 5 in Wooster, Ohio. The conference will offer extensive use and operation of the apparatus, tools, equipment and practices encountered in rural firefighting and provide opportunities to interact with the manufacturers and service providers.

With an increased emphasis on training at trade shows, how does RFI differ from other training or volunteer associations?

A couple of us started teaching in the rural communities back in the '70s. When you look at all the training out there today, the rural departments are the ones that get left out. Part of the reason we created RFI wasn't because we wanted a membership organization. We sent letters to the other organizations and stated we didn't want to be the [National] Volunteer Fire Council because many of the volunteer firefighters are career people, combination or other types of firefighters. We wanted to have a mechanism to get training to the people that aren't getting the other training. I've had people ask, “When are they going to start focusing on our needs?”…

At so many of the conferences, there are big displays of static equipment, but nobody can get their hands on them and play with them. What we need to have is a good, old-fashioned fire school where people can get down and use it in a fire environment.

How has training changed over your years with the fire service?

I was out in the wildfire conference in Albuquerque and a guy from Washington state has an online fire program. We started talking about my being on the [NFPA] 1001 [Fire Fighter Professional Qualifications] committee and he asked me, “Why did you let them screw everything up?” Training has become the issue, and in my estimation, learning has fallen by the wayside.

With the increased focus on safety, we're still killing as many as we ever did in structure fires. All that training deals with skills and knowledge, it doesn't deal with attitude — it's the attitudinal area that's the important area. We asked what they get from state training and they said nothing. They can't afford to travel or take the time.

The state training instructors are under the gun to get people trained and certified and try to comply with all the different standards. What happens is that when they are put in the position to make a decision, their default is “What does the standards say?” They're caught between a rock and a hard spot, too. The fact of the matter is that a lot of the training the rural departments take is a 200-hour course and maybe only 20 hours is what they need to have.

Rural departments have pretty tight budgets. Besides the conference, how will you deliver this information to rural departments?

We also wanted to put together training materials and we're doing that through our Web site. Roy Hoffman [RFI's secretary/treasurer] and I just got through developing visual learning guides. We put together two programs, one's on relay-pumping operations and another is a water-on-wheels operations. Each one is about 135 slides with text and are intended for either self-study or if somebody wants to teach a class from them, they print it out as a handout and it amounts to a booklet.

We're also doing a monthly exercise called Incident Command Exercise, which is actually a strategy and tactics program. The first issue dealt with farm fires. It's four pages and gives three different scenarios dealing with barn fires. There's also a sheet that covers all the things they need to think about and to have group discussions. There's also a list of some considerations to help the training officer or whoever to have a training drill. One of the things we talked about initially was to start a dialogue as part of the training.

Is there one message you would like people to take away?

People need to realize that across this country, the first responder to virtually any incident — other than something that needs a guy with a gun — is a fire department in a rural community. Travel on any interstate highway and if it's not in a city, it's out in the country, and the people that respond out there — EMS, hazmat, whatever — the first responders are them.

For more on the Rural Firefighting Institute, visit www.rfi411.org.