Trying to fill spots in their sophomore year class schedules, East seniors and friends Luke Blalock and Gavin Allen decided to join a program intended to teach them how to save lives. Now, for the past two years, Blalock and Allen have been taking classes and training to become certified firefighters.
Instead of heading straight to East in the morning like most students, Allen and Blalock start their day at Chapel Hill High School. There, they take part in both hands-on and lecture-style classes centered around anything and everything firefighting, including a course with the EMT Academy. At lunch, they return to East for their other three classes.
“It’s a very physical class,” Blalock said. “Any tools that are on a fire truck, we use. The Jaws of Life, we use. We’ve used them to turn a car into a convertible”.
Allen described the Jaws of Life, also known as spreaders, as essentially giant pliers, used to push open doors and remove parts of a car in order to get people out of them in accidents.
“Our building is connected to an automotive building, and they have a lot of junk cars because that’s what they’ll work on,” Allen explained. “So whenever they give up on fixing a car or just don’t need a car anymore, they’ll give it to us so we can do whatever we want with it. The car we were cutting was some type of sedan, and what we did was break off all of the windows, take off the doors, and then cut each of the posts to where we could just lift off the roof, and make it into a convertible.”
“The goal of [the academy] is that when we graduate, we can walk out of high school and become full time firefighters,” Blalock said.
Both joined on somewhat of a whim.
“My brother was going to do [the program] but he didn’t end up doing it,” Allen said. “So I was like, ‘I’ll just give it a try,’ and it was super fun, so I stayed in it.”
The group of sophomores that initially signed up for the academy was small, and after students realized how serious the program was, many dropped it. Now, Allen and Blalock are the only East students remaining, with four other students participating from Chapel Hill.
Leading the group through the course and the training is fire academy instructor Travis Adkison. The group also trains alongside the Chapel Hill, Carrboro, New Hope and Greensboro Fire Departments.
“Ideally these other departments would be hiring us in the future,” Blalock said. “So it’s great to get to show them what we can do before they hire us.”
Allen says the other fire departments also give them access to tools they wouldn’t have otherwise.
“We had Carrboro [Fire Department] come in and show us how to use a ladder truck,” he said. “We get to build connections within the fire service.”
Sophomore year, the New Hope Fire Department also came to work with the group. Now, along with taking these classes and training with the Academy, Blalock and Allen are also Junior Firefighters with the department.
“It’s not part of the program, it’s something different that we chose to do,” Allen said. “We run calls at New Hope, so we have experience of being an on-call firefighter.”
Cutting the roof off of a car, turning a car into a convertible, and “rolling a dash” are just a few of the things Allen and Blalock have done.
“Sometimes when you get in a crash, the dash[board] will collapse and get stuck on someone’s leg, and you have to roll that, or push it up out away from them, which we call rolling a dash,” explained Allen.
But the thing they were most excited for was something called a drop tank. A drop tank is “pretty much just a pool of water that you use when you don’t have a hydrant or a lake so you can have water to flow to the building,” according to Allen.
“The fun part of [the drop tank] was throwing Gavin in on his birthday,” Blalock said.
By doing this program, Allen and Blalock can graduate from East and jump right into a job, while taking college classes.
“Out of high school I’m going straight into the fire service. I’ll be a full-time firefighter, get my associate’s and maybe my bachelor’s,” Blalock said.
Allen also plans on working in the fire service, while attending college in Fayetteville.
“Another good thing about firefighting is, depending on where you work, you can work 10 times a month, 24-hour shifts, which is 21 other days where you can work on school work,” Allen said.
Blalock says that, through all the grueling tasks they take part in, “the feeling you get when you save someone’s life is unbelievable.”
Photo courtesy of @chccsfireacademy/Instagram
