WESTFIELD – The younger children in the city’s schools will get a little more time outside next week – and a little more excitement – as the city firefighters spend Fire Prevention Week visiting all the city’s elementary schools.
Dep. Fire Chief Patrick Egloff briefed members of the school department Tuesday and said that next week firefighters will bring the department’s new tower truck to each elementary school, and Fort Meadow School, visiting two schools each day.
Egloff explained that at each school the program will begin with a fire drill.
After all the children have been evacuated and the drill concludes, he said, the children in kindergarten and grades one and two will remain outside when the older children return to their classrooms.
He said “we’ll have the tower truck at our disposal” and the children will be able to get a closer look at the new apparatus. He said that the tower truck will serve as a backdrop as members of the Student Awareness of Fire Education team “do a show and tell on it and give all the kids basic student awareness of fire education.”
As in past years, Egloff said, firefighters will bring a staff member up in the tower but cautioned that the new tower, which rises 100 feet into the air, is “bouncier” than the platform truck it replaced. He said that, like the firefighters who work from the tower, staff members who get to experience it will have to will have to wear a safety belt while they are looking down at the children.
Egloff said that the program will take about an hour to an hour and a half at each school.
