Barbara Lawlor, Gilpin County.  The first rule of teaching anything to children is to get their attention. Last Wednesday, at the Gilpin County Library, Chip Smith, assistant chief with the Timberline Fire Protection District did just that.

Smith said he was used to talking about fire safety to kids ages five through eight, so he was a bit nervous about facing a gang of two to five year olds. When he had the kids gathered in a circle in the library and had asked them some questions about fire safety, he read from a book, “If I Were a Firefighter.” The kids learned that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were firefighters.

“I could see I was losing them, so I began the interesting part of the presentation,” says Smith.

One of the first and most important lessons a firefighter can teach a child is not to be afraid when they see a firefighter with his self-contained breathing apparatus that looks like a Darth Vador mask enter a building. A child’s instinct is to hide from the “monster.”

The library lights were dimmed and a smoke machine sent fake plumes of white steam into the doorway as firefighters dressed in bunker gear appeared, carrying their axes and shining their flashlights.

Actually, the kids were more fascinated than scared, but when the library’s smoke detector went off, they all covered their ears and looked around nervously.

The lights came on, the smoke detectors were turned off and the firefighters began to de-layer their gear; the jacket, the helmet, the hood, the shirt, the pants held up by suspenders and Voila! there was a normal human being, one of them a female with a big smile.

It was a graphic demonstration of what a firefighter entering a building filled with smoke would look like. Under all the scary stuff, there is a person coming to find you and take you to safety.

Now for the fun stuff. Chip led the children out to the library parking lot where one of the district’s huge fire engines was parked. In front of the engine was a structure that resembled a house with four windows filled with flames. It was up to the kids to save the building.

The first exercise was the bucket brigade in which orange buckets were to be passed from one child to the next, all the way to the orange bucket at the end, which needed to be doused with water. It took a few practice rounds for the kids to understand what the exercise was about. At first some of them had to be encouraged to pass the bucket on.

Then, when it reached the last person, a couple of the children threw the water bucket at the fake flaming bucket; some of them kicked the bucket.

When all the buckets had undergone the brigade, the next challenge was putting the fake flames out with a hose. A real firefighter hose squirting a heavy stream of water is hard to hold so the kids had some help from the volunteer firefighters.

Some of the children were having so much fun, they wouldn’t let go of the hose, wanting to continue zapping the flames in the window.

Finally, it was time to go. The debut firefighting session of the Gilpin Library Summer Reading Program came to an end and everyone went home a little wiser, even the firefighters.

(Originally published in the July 20, 2017 print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)