It’s not easy to train the fire department. Their first job is always protecting us from fires and lots of other mayhem. If you are Michael Lebsack, Commanding Officer Marine Safety Unit Duluth, you want to make sure the local fire departments, in this case Duluth’s and Superior’s, know how to fight a fire in a Great Lakes freighter. (There are 12 of them spending the winter in the Twin Ports.) He brought in Mike Romstadt, Supervisor of MARAD’s Great Lakes Fire Training Center in Swanton, Ohio. (MARAD: Maritime Administration, a part of the US Department of Transportation). It was a one day training program, one part in the classroom, by Romstadt, and one part by the Coast guard while touring two of the vessels in port for the winter.
There are 3 shifts of fire fighters, in two cities, one teacher, and 4 boats; the American Victory & St Clair at Fraser Shipyards in Superior and the Edwin H. Gott and John G. Munson in Duluth.
Neither department likes to take their rigs over the bridge to the other side since that puts them further away from that mayhem I mentioned. So you have to do the training in both cities. It worked pretty good.
While one shift from the Duluth department was touring the Edwin H. Gott and John G. Munson in Duluth, Romstadt was in the class room in Superior teaching one shift of fire fighters from Superior. I arrived on the scene on Wednesday afternoon in Duluth for the Gott tour. That morning, Romstadt had been in the classroom at the Duluth fire department doing the classroom work while a shift of Superior fire fighters was at the shipyard in Superior touring the American Victory and the St. Clair with the Coast Guard. They did that same routine with another shift on Tuesday and they would take the 3rd shift of fire fighters on Thursday.
From the deck of the Gott: I took this picture of the Walter J. McCarthy, Jr. at top right, the John G. Munson at top left and a lot of wind turbines blades ready to be trucked to a variety of destinations.
I wanted to get a picture of their trucks with the Gott in the background but they kept driving around as if they were looking for a parking space. In a way they were – they wanted to make sure the rigs were pointed in the right direction if they received a fire call. That sounded like a good idea to me.
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