Superior Fire Department receives grant for Emotional Resiliency Training

The Superior Fire Department has received a grant from Essentia Health to fund a new Emotional Resiliency Training for all of their staff.

Fire Chief Cameron Vollbrecht explains saying, “So what we’ll be doing is bringing in specialist who will specialize in training firefighters in dealing with emotional issues stemming from exposure on the job.”

Because of the huge responsibility of their jobs, firefighters can weighed down by their mental health. Vollbrecht says, “From a personal level we all see things differently we react to things differently. Some people trigger from different things. Because we are firefighters, we live and work in these communities. An incident may have happened at a house or on a block, or with an age of a person involved and every time we drive by that place we may have a trigger of what happened at that site.”

“And through long careers in the fire service we tend to build those things up which can cause emotional issues, PTSD, and things like that. So what this training will provide is the tools to identify those issues as they’re starting before they start up,” says the fire chief.

The department even has extra spots for their sessions so they’ve invited other first responders in the Northland to come and take advantage of the opportunity.