When it comes to setting the firefighter training bar on the highest rung, you’re not going to convince Heath Orabanec that Sequoyah County takes a back seat to any other training regimen.

“This county has a high standard for training, set by members of this county,” Orabanec told county commissioners Monday at their weekly meeting. “I think it’s the responsibility of those coming up behind us to keep those standards high, and to keep setting them higher. I think that’s what we have now. I think probably in the last 5 to 10 years, we started those building blocks. And there’s people coming in and starting to take it a little more and a little more.

“I just think you can’t have a high enough standard,” said Orabanec, fire chief for Sequoyah County Rural Fire Protection District #1.

For 10 minutes Monday, Orabanec took an opportunity, with the commissioners’ permission, to “burn a little air,” he said colloquially.

While the training standards are high for county firefighters, so is the cost. As Orabanec told the commissioners, “about $33,000 per class — that’s what it would cost to be able to do the training, because we usually have four instructors from OSU.”

The standard training class, now in its fifth week with 20 students who are OSU certified when they complete the class, is the third such class since the inception of the county’s burn facility in northwest Sallisaw, which is an integral part of the required skills training. That’s a cumulative cost approaching $100,000 for the three years.

But it hasn’t cost county fire departments a nickel.

Three years of grants along with funding from ICTC and other sources have made it possible for “close to 120 firefighters trained to a better standard than what they were before,” Orabanec said. The current training class includes students from throughout the county, as well as some from Stigler and Bokoshe.

“So if you look at that, that’s about $90,000 we’ve saved, because ICTC has been good enough to provide funding for this class. So it didn’t cost any of the fire departments any money,” Orabanec told the commissioners. “Had we not had that training facility out there, we would be looking at going to some other location to have to do this, and then there’s the burden and hardship on the students to travel and go. Right now the farthest anyone’s traveling is from Bokoshe to do this, and they’re coming here every Saturday to do their skills at the burn tower.”

Orabanec explained that the training class consists of coursework during the week and skills training on Saturday, which is in contrast to a normal fire academy that is five hours per day for eight weeks.

“Volunteers can’t do that, obviously,” Orabanec said of the fire academy schedule. “So this class is the ideal way to be able to make that work. We agreed to build a new classroom out there, which they just finished it this weekend. The outside’s done, it just needs the overhead doors put into it to have it all secure, and then they’ll start on the interior work. So that’s another plus for us to be able to have that.

“We have classes coming up that a lot of money is not going to be paid out by anybody in this county. The state’s got a lot of grant funds that we’ve been able to secure to hold these classes,” Orabanec said. “We’ll have another hazmat operations class in June. That’s about $18,000 that’s not going to be out of pocket for any fire department, because we’ve got some grant funding there.

“Next month, the city is gonna allow us to use the chamber of commerce facility. We’re going to have an international fire chief ’s recruitment and retention class. This is a class that’s specific for a national class to help the volunteer firefighters kind of help and figure out a lane to get more folks involved and possibly retain some folks and recruit new people, too. So we’re trying to keep folks that we can that we’ve invested this time and training in, and be able to keep them here and not lose this,” he said.

Orabanec said the culture of training in the county has changed. With the availability of the burn facility on Eppler Road along with quality instruction, there’s no longer any barrier for those willing to step up and take advantage of local training. And well-trained firefighters often mean financial savings for county residents.

“We’re being able to get this grant funding and the money here to be able to keep the firefighters. Firefighters are the greatest people in the world, but they’re the first ones to gripe about anything that changes. They want something different, but they don’t want to change.

“People always gripe: ‘OSU, will never have any training. We don’t have training here’,” Orabanec explained. “We’re on the radar of OSU now. Their regents are talking about how much stuff is going on in this part of the state for training firefighters now. The amount of training we’ve had in the last three years, we haven’t had that in the last 20 years available here. So the opportunities for folks to get it is just a matter of those folks stepping up and doing it. There’s no longer the excuses, ‘We don’t have a facility. It’s too far to drive. We don’t have good teachers.’ This class, this one going on right now, is being taught all by incounty instructors. So we have the people here, we have the facility, we just have to get the folks to commit and do it. Because in the long run, it’s the safety of all the community, and it’s money in everybody’s pocket if the firefighters are trained to this standard, because, at that point, we start talking about homeowners’ insurances going down. I’d love it if somebody gave up six weeks for training and it made my house insurance cheaper and I didn’t have to do anything for it.” “Most people don’t understand that,” District 3 Commissioner Jim Rogers agreed with Orabanec.

Orabanec said he’s trying to educate residents in an effort to combat “this same old negative norm of, ‘Well, it didn’t benefit me directly.’ Well, it does. The insurance companies are becoming a lot more restrictive. You look at Washington, California and all those folks out there. And insurance companies pulled completely out of some of those areas. Because the fire danger was too great and the firefighters just didn’t have enough training. So we don’t want to hear of anything like that happened here.”

“We’re proud of all our volunteer fire departments. They do a great job. Not only that, but first responders,” Rogers said.

Training, however, is not limited to firefighters.

“Training’s always been a big deal with me,” Sheriff Larry Lane added. “While there are those who offer just the minimum state-required training, I always try to get double, and we spend a lot of money on training. That helps so much. When the guys go to court, they get up there and part of their testimony is always, ‘In my experience and training …’ Well, the attorneys will say, ‘What kind of training you got?’ You oughta come see my training list that I send these guys to. I spend a lot of money on training. I know some people complain about it, but it’s needed and it helps with liability. These guys are trained right, just like the firemen. Nobody can even compare to the training that we get. The guys like it, and it helps the county and protects our ability.”

To be sure, training requires commitment.

“It takes a lot of time, whether it’s the firefighters or the deputies, you’re gone from home to go train. We don’t get to just sit here in the classroom and do it right here at home all the time. They’ve got to be gone, sometimes for a week, here, there,” Orabanec told the commissioners. “People don’t see that back side of public safety of what those folks involved give up at home, missing ballgames and birthdays to go get this training. Some of this training isn’t always available all the time. It may only be a couple of times a year that you can get in there.”

A live burn at the training facility is scheduled for March 24, which for firefighters is their Super Bowl.

“We’re making the most we can of it. It’s working really well, because when this is all said and done, over the last three years since we’ve had the facility, we’ll have 120 firefighters trained to a better standard than what they were before,” Orabanec said.