The St. Agatha Fire Department is bringing Aroostook County’s first agricultural rescue training to local emergency responders.
The session, developed by a Wisconsin medical research institute, will take place on Saturday, June 21 in Frenchville.
A major industry in rural Aroostook County, farming relies on massive equipment, chemicals and more that could become hazards. But first responders have little preparation for agricultural emergencies, said Jeff Fournier, St. Agatha Fire Department safety officer. Though major accidents are rare, they can be deadly, and the faster responders can act, the faster lives — and farms — could be saved.
“One of the things that was enlightening to me was if you have a catastrophic event on a farm, where somebody is severely injured or unfortunately gets killed, the likelihood of that farm going out of business is about 70 percent in the next five years,” Fournier said Friday.
“And there is a child killed about every three days on a farm nationwide,” he added.
That hits home in St. Agatha, where 13-year-old Teddy Parent died in a tractor accident in March.
Saturday’s session is the first module in a series that will prepare local crews for such things as equipment rollovers, harvester accidents, chemical fires and even large animal rescues, Fournier said.
A Van Buren native, Fournier was a career firefighter in Cape Cod and later an emergency vehicle dealer. He learned about farm rescue training from a colleague, who introduced him to the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin.
When he moved back to The County a few years ago, he was amazed to find that such training wasn’t offered in a farming hub like northern Maine. He wanted to change that.
He contacted the institute’s National Farm Medicine Center, which offers the Rural Firefighters Delivering Agricultural Safety and Health program to help prevent fatalities on farms. The center invited him and fellow firefighter Andrew Guerrette to Wisconsin in October. Their four-day education was eye-opening and inspired them to bring the training to The County, Fournier said.
Today’s large, complex farm equipment presents challenges requiring more than the Jaws of Life.
“If you get somebody entangled in a device like a huge harvester, we don’t have the tools to help someone,” he said.
Aroostook County’s large area can also result in slow response times depending on where the incident happens, so pre-planning is crucial.
Building community is also important, Fournier said. For instance, an incident in a distant field may need wreckers, other fire crews and even community members to help ferry supplies, he said. Responders want to be able to dispatch everything and everyone when needed.
Fournier and Guerrette will host Saturday’s session in collaboration with the Marshfield organization, which will send instructors to Frenchville. The program will run from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and costs nothing thanks to federal grant funding, Fournier said.
Besides rescue techniques, part of the training focuses on fostering good relationships with farmers and even how to give simple first aid instruction, so farm crews can start helping an injured person before rescuers arrive.
Participants will learn about farm mapping, which uses a smartphone app to pinpoint the exact location of an emergency. With help from farmers, departments can name each field and building on a farm. When a call comes in about an incident in “storage building A,” for example, they can look at the app and know immediately where to go, Fournier said.
Attendees will visit Labrie Farms of St. Agatha to examine the elements of one potato growing operation.
Visit rfdash.org/upcomingtraining/ to learn more and register for the training, which has a limit of 30 first responders.
Fournier is already planning to grow the program. Topics such as grain elevator rescues and compact tractor safety are in the works, along with a multiple-day session that will include hands-on rescue training. The St. Agatha Fire Department is working with local vendors and sponsors to keep the sessions free, he said.
For him, it’s not just about preparing rescuers, but galvanizing communities.
“The goal is also to get people thinking about how much we have to work with each other as municipalities within The County,” he said. “We have to really depend on each other, because you can’t just do it alone. It’s not a one-department response.”
