Madison Co. firefighters participate in special training

JACKSON, Tenn. — The Madison County Fire Department is taking it a step further when it comes to saving the lives of others.

Wbbj-7 takes us to a mock missing person training.

Firefighters in the Madison County Fire Department Special Division Operations are known to work efficiently, while helping to save the lives of others.

Saturday morning firefighters teamed up to participate in a mock missing persons training. Practicing on how to effectively search for missing people.

“What we’ve got is a simulation of an elderly female that has went into the woods and our special operations division is trying to do a search with search grids and search patterns to find the missing person,” said Madison County Fire Chief Eric Turner.

Team members are divided into groups, as they go out into the woods looking for the simulated missing person.

Chief Eric Turner and another firefighter will watch each group from a high map technology while they complete the task.

Tracking them from the GPS unit, Turner says this technology would be used for actual missing person cases.

Making sure to map out the entire area of the woods where the search is taking place.

“When we have missing children, dementia patients, they wander off and they call on us to search for those folks. So we just like to make sure everybody is up to par on what we’re doing and how to do that,” Turner said.

He says during the training he hopes firefighters not only stay familiar with what they’ve learned but also the importance of saving people.

“This is specialized equipment for searching that we don’t use every day. If you don’t use something regularly, you kind of lose it. So this is something we practice on the regular basis to make sure everybody is proficient with it,” Turner said.

Chief turner says they will host another training for fire-fighters in the future.