LARGO, Fla. - Every Friday for at least four hours, Largo Fire Rescue’s extrication team trains to be able to respond on the worst day of someone’s life.
"We just commit to it," Lt. Billy Stark, the team’s Incident Commander, said. "Guys have a lot of passion for this, and it's showing."
They get to show that passion to the world in one month. The volunteer-based team qualified for the World Rescue Organization extrication competition in Croatia that starts Sept. 5.
"They bring in 37 to 40 teams from all over the world and they compete in a three-day extrication challenge. So, they'll set up two to three vehicles with two patients inside and you have anywhere from 12 to 25 minutes to remove both patients and safely treat them," Lt. Stark said.
They’re judged on command presence, tactical abilities and medical assessments. Last year was their first time at worlds. They placed fifteenth out of 37.
What they're saying:
"We've grown so much in the last year just from our social media and other fire departments that have reached out to us. We host classes now and teach other fire departments what we do for the street-wise, not necessarily competition. We also hold seminars for the competitors to come here and judges will come over and assess us and help us prepare for the events that are coming in the future," he said.
"It’s something I've never dreamed, it would be this big that we're doing. All the guys, we talked about it last week, we never expected in our career to be at this level. And now that we are excited, but we're just as passionate and teaching is our main focus," Stark said. "We want people to get better. We want to be able to use the tools properly and help the public in this area. A lot of us have families that live around here, and we want the person that's going to run on our family to be treating them just like we would. So, we really want to pass on the knowledge that we've learned, and it's just been, it's been a very humbling, very exciting, and very tiring experience too."
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Lt. Stark said this year, they expect to be in the top 10.
"It'd be nice for the city of Largo to have a top 10 education team in the entire world. It's a very good bragging right. We're just excited to keep this thing going," he said.
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The Source: FOX 13’s Kailey Tracy spoke with Largo Fire Rescue for this story.