Killeen fire academy cadets training to become firefighters

KILLEEN, Texas (KWTX) - For the past three months now the Killeen fire academy has been teaching their newest cadets the ins and outs of being a firefighter.

Now these cadets are on week 14 of a grueling 16 week training process, which is when they finally get to put all of the skills and knowledge they’ve learned to the test.

Becoming a firefighter is no easy task and these cadets have spent weeks learning everything from the different types of flames to how to extract someone from a car.

For cadets like Kaleb Espinoza, it’s been a difficult but rewarding process.

“It was very rough at first. A lot of learning, a lot of hands-on training, and a lot of discipline also”.

This week the cadets finally get the opportunity to show off what they’ve learned with live fire exercises.

Chief of the Killeen Fire Training Academy, Bradley Jansen, explained that “this is the culmination of all the training basically, they’ve been working on everything for 14 weeks and here they’re going to put that all to use”.

“All the training up to this point really kicked in, a lot of it can seem kind of dry throughout the academy until you actually reach this point,” said Espinoza, who’s also the class commander.

For this exercise they had to go inside one of the academy’s burn buildings, where instructors had started a fire, and rescue a baby doll.

Cadets made a route through all the flames and smoke, and then safely found their way back out with the doll.

All of the cadets today were excited to finally get to run a real life scenario, and captain Bradley Jansen says it was great seeing how far they’ve come.

“I’m really proud of these guys,” shared Captain Jansen, “they’ve worked really hard, they’ve really done a great job in receiving all the training, they worked hard to pass the test. There’s a lot of actual book work that has to be done with it as well and they’ve studied hard, they worked hard, and they’ve done a great job”.

Captain Jansen also shared that their academy has had great recruitment in recent years, filling their class max of 30 cadets.

“In previous years we’ve had pretty close to 30, but over the last probably three years we’ve really seen an influx in the number of people that have come to our academy”.

This year they started out with 30 cadets, and as of today they now have 25 cadets remaining. But after this week all that’s left is their final exams and then graduation.

“I’ve been ready for this this whole academy so to finally reach the end is a great goal, great accomplishment and I’m ready to put in a lot of work here in the city of Killeen,”  shared Espinoza.

Of the cadets that make it to graduation, some will go to work at other fire departments around central Texas, but many will stay in Killeen.

Some of these cadets will even go to work at the department’s new fire station, which is breaking ground next month and will include a new fire academy training facility.

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