Predictable and always a delight: Interschutz is a gathering place for the fire service community. For us, that means meeting many course graduates, interested parties, instructors, and representatives from fire service academies, organisations, and government departments. What we’re particularly excited about: Our new «On-Site Training» offer has been very well received. Our new offer also provides fire services with long journey times to our location with an additional option for preparing for firefighting operations in rail and road tunnels.
On-site training can now begin
Many visitors learnt about our new on-site training offer, which aims to provide additional support for preparing for firefighting operations in rail and road tunnels. Amongst graduates of our courses, the on-site Tunnel Tactics and on-site train-the-trainer courses were particularly requested. Fire service officials saw this as a valuable addition to the intensive practical training they had received in our training tunnels. They want to take advantage of this offer to refresh what has been learnt and, in doing so, involve additional personnel. The first on-site training courses were booked right at the trade fair.
On-site training as preparation for courses in Switzerland
Fire services with very long journeys to the ifa were particularly interested in our comprehensive on-site training offer. They see this as an on-site opportunity to optimise operational preparations and better prepare selected firefighters for a practical course at our tunnel training facilities. Our German-language on-site pilot courses are due to start this autumn, enabling the offering to be extended to include other languages in the near future.
Underground car park courses are in high demand
Since Interschutz 2022, word has spread beyond the «tunnel world» that we offer training courses for operations in underground car parks. Interest has grown accordingly. At the exhibition stand, there was interest not only in our courses at our training car park in Balsthal, but also in on-site training courses. We will look into this. Priority will initially be given to offers for fire services with tunnels within their operational area. The experience gained from these courses will be incorporated into the planning of the on-site underground car park courses.
Unexpectedly high demand, even outside Europe
As well as many visitors from Europe – including Germany, Austria, the Benelux countries, Denmark, England and Ireland – fire service officials from Indonesia, Brazil, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar also enquired about our rail and road tunnel training courses. There is considerable interest in fundamental fire service tunnel training from these countries. To make the trip to Switzerland even more worthwhile for course participants from distant countries, we always explore opportunities to collaborate with other international training providers for each course on offer, with a view to putting together value-for-money packages – for example, by combining the course with industrial firefighting or USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) training.
We are looking forward to Interschutz 2030
Exchanging ideas with firefighters from many different countries is very important to us in our work. We’ve once again come away from Interschutz with lots of ideas and will be there again in 2030. The date has already been set: We’ll be back in Hanover from 20 to 25 May 2030.
