Myrtle Beach Fire Department hosts 7th Citizens Fire Academy
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) — The Myrtle Beach Fire Department welcomed new members to its 7th Citizens Fire Academy, where community members get hands-on training and take a deeper look at the department's operations.
The department started the 10-week program in 2019, and Capt. Jonathan Evans said it incorporates a little bit of everything.
'This week we're doing EMS skills, talking about CPR, showing them an ambulance, all those things,' Evans said. 'Next week, we'll be doing a history of the fire service so, they'll kind of see where the whole thing started, all the way up. They'll also get to go to the Emergency Operations Center and check out what they have going on there.'
He said this year's 18-member group is the largest yet
'I've had everything from 18 to 81 years old in this class, and it's all about how much you want to get into it. It's not for a job necessarily, it's more for information,' Evans said. 'Although, it uses as a pathway for some folks get hired to learn more about the department, so we can also learn more about them.'
Evans said a handful of members selected for this program have graduated and become firefighters; others may have helped the department gain sponsorships.
'We want our community to be educated because it helps for when we go to ask for a fire truck, or a station, or whatever the case may be,' Evans said. 'If we're not showing them why, or what we need it for, or what we're doing, it kind of makes it a little more difficult.'
Evans said the group meets once a week for about two hours.
'They'll do some fire skills later on in the fire gear, and right here on the training ground do the smoke maze, do the burn building, really getting as involved as they want to get,' he said.
Evans said those in the group will also have the opportunity to drive a fire truck through a concise course, go up about a hundred feet in the ladder truck, and learn water rescue skills.
'We haven't had the chance to get them to the ocean yet with this program because of the time of the year when we do it, but usually, we go to one of the city pools,' Evans said. 'Chief Mitch talks about what the water rescue program is. We'll have some of his ocean rescue supervisors, and they'll do some skills in the pool.'
Currently, Evans said the program is only offered during the springtime.
He said the department has talked to a few state representatives in different departments about the program to hopefully start implementing it elsewhere.
* * *
Jackie LiBrizzi is a multimedia journalist at News13. Jackie is originally from Hamilton, New Jersey, and was raised in Piedmont, South Carolina. Jackie joined the News13 team in June 2023 after she graduated as a student-athlete from the University of South Carolina in May 2023. Follow Jackie on X, formerly Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and read more of her work here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Two saved after climbing down cliff for dropped phone, California officials say
Two tourists who climbed down a cliff near San Francisco seeking a dropped phone had to be rescued, California firefighters reported. The rescue took place between Mile Rock Beach and Deadman's Point on Saturday, June 7, the San Francisco Fire Department said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. The visitors were enjoying a view of the Golden Gate Bridge when one dropped a phone over the edge at about 3:30 p.m., firefighters reported on Instagram. They climbed down the cliff after the phone and became stuck, firefighters said. Rescuers used ropes to save the two in an operation that took about one hour, the department said. The tourists were not injured but were issued a ticket. They could be fined up to $300 apiece, SF Gate reported. The visitors are from Seattle, KRON reported.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
What's So Shocking About a Man Who Loves His Wife?
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. A few Sundays ago, I was in a car ride home with my wife when the light caught her face in a lovely way. I snapped a photo, and shortly afterward posted it to Instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate: a man smiling, with hearts in place of his eyes. I did this because I love her. My love for my wife does not exist solely online; I often express it directly to her, or talk about her in glowing terms to friends and co-workers. It feels natural—as natural as sharing my feelings about anything to the internet, in the same way I'd post about how much I'm enjoying my Twin Peaks rewatch, or the particularly good sandwich I ate on vacation. So the first time that someone called me a 'wife guy,' I wasn't sure how to react. If you are encountering this phrase for the first time and think wife guy surely must mean 'a guy who loves his wife,' you would be dead wrong. The term, which rose to popularity sometime during the first Trump administration, describes someone whose spousal affection is so ostentatious that it becomes inherently untrustworthy. 'The wife guy defines himself,' the critic Amanda Hess has written, 'through a kind of overreaction to being married.' The wife guy posts a photo of his wife to Instagram along with several emojis of a man smiling with hearts in place of his eyes. He will repeat this sort of action so many times that even his closest friends may think, Enough already. He is so consistently and loudly psyched about being married that sirens are set off in the mind of family members and strangers alike, who wonder what shortcomings he aspires to compensate for through such enthusiastic declarations. In a world where identity is always being performed on social media, this particular identity is clearly one to avoid. But I, a guy who loves his wife, can't help but conclude that valuable terrain is being ceded when we think poorly of the wife guy. Many men, accustomed to bottling up their feelings, are already afraid to show what's in their heart and on their mind. If some of them are actually moved to express their love publicly and unabashedly—is this so wrong? The term wife guy is a by-product of several converging trends. On social media, millions of people have become accustomed to broadcasting what they are up to, a recurring action that eventually reduces most behaviors and traits to caricature. Do you drink a lot of Diet Coke? Watch out, lest you become a 'Diet Coke guy.' At the same time, the mechanics of social media are such that basically any identity can be created and monetized—and so thousands of people might desperately aspire to make a living by being a Diet Coke guy. Some already do. Once a clever person recognized that 'loving your wife' was an emotion that some people were performing in notable ways, the wife guy seemed to be everywhere. There was the 'curvy-wife guy,' an influencer who made lots of content about how much he adored his plus-size wife. There was the 'cliff-wife guy,' a different influencer who posted a dramatic video about the shock of watching his wife fall off a cliff. (It was more of a short drop, and she appeared to be basically fine.) Celebrities such as John Mulaney, Prince Harry, and Ryan Reynolds turned their marriages into content, so much content. These guys wanted to be wife guys and made 'Honor thy wife' into an informal commandment for modern living. This was around the time of the #MeToo movement, in which men's scummy behavior toward women was suddenly being reevaluated across society—and the wife guy, though perhaps over-the-top, seemed to be a welcome corrective. [Read: There's no way to repair marriage without repairing men] As more wife guys popped up, the phrase evolved. Before long, you did not have to be a public figure to be a wife guy—you just had to be a guy. And the establishment of this easily attainable personality opened it up for critique. Some wife guys didn't appear to love their wives all that much; their affection seemed a bit forced, or stage-directed, or perhaps even outright transactional. Some famous wife guys got divorced, or cheated on their wives, or began to look like they were going through the motions. The rapturous feelings they'd shown began to seem like a cover-up for some sort of unpleasant truth. 'Posting publicly on social media about your love for your spouse shouldn't be a sign of cheating,' the New York Post declared, 'but in 2022, it's an immediate red flag.' Wife guy, always a little mocking, curdled into the plainly pejorative. Thus did my friends' casual remarks that I was a wife guy begin to feel like digs, even if they weren't meant that way. That I, a 36-year-old heterosexual man, should love my wife does not seem like a grand surprise. I married her for love, not because of a secret desire to inherit her immense oil fortune (she does not have one) or because of an accidental pregnancy and subsequent familial pressure to tie the knot (no baby here). I met her through a mutual pal—her best friend was also my boss—and a few months later, I sat back and thought to myself, You know, I am having a tremendously good time getting to know this beautiful, intelligent, hilarious, kind, ambitious woman with great taste in movies and books and music and fashion whom all of my friends love. Within a few years, we were engaged, and wedded not long after that, a series of decisions that felt as instinctual and obvious as ordering more bread to go with my unused dip. Hence my surprise when my uncomplicated expressions of adoration started to be noticed—and judged. [Read: Today's masculinity is stifling] Still, I understand why other people might be suspicious. When my wife and I were first dating, and everything felt so good, I could not always avoid sounding smug. 'It feels like,' I told one friend, 'we're better than every other couple.' I do not think my friends were hoping our relationship would fail, but they were unfamiliar with the emotions I was broadcasting—it probably did seem like I was putting it on, when really I was just very happy. Obviously I know love is not about showing off how in love you are. Love contains something internal and unmeasurable that can be weighed only in private, not presented for others to observe. And in fact, when dating, I was accustomed to adopting a more defensive pose, in which I'd play it cool so that my future self wouldn't look back with regret at how I'd left myself exposed. Such is a subcurrent of the skepticism toward the wife guy: an anticipation of the moment when all this publicly performed love will collapse onto itself, and be revealed as shortsighted. I knew it, thinks the naysayer. But falling in love, and getting married, has changed a great many things about the way I see the world, and validated other ideas that I suspected were true but had not yet confirmed for myself. Namely, that love requires vulnerability—a willingness to be naive and silly, a willingness to lay down your defenses and welcome what comes next, whether good or bad. To me, this is the only state of being worth pursuing in this life. Of course, I'd prefer to keep multiple aspects of this alchemic process, and my marriage, to myself (for example, the level of mess that occasionally accumulates when two writers live together). But sometimes, I just want to share it with the world—even if it makes people roll their eyes. We are all performing some identity, in some way, and I can live with being a 'guy who loves his wife a lot,' no matter what nicknames it brings. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
See Gizmo fly! Second Big Bear eaglet has flown the nest
See Gizmo fly! The Big Bear eaglet "fledged," which means it flew out of the nest, on Saturday at the age of 13 weeks old. Gizmo is the second eaglet to fly out of the family nest this year, wowing fans of the live webcam that monitors the Big Bear family of eagles that includes mom Jackie, dad Shadow and sibling Sunny. "As this is an extremely sensitive time for Jackie and Shadow and their fledglings, their habitat remains closed by federal order. For their safety, please do not go into or around the habitat," according to a post from Friends of Big Bear Valley. The U.S. Forest Service and the California Fish and Wildlife agencies are monitoring the area in order to keep the eagles and their habitat protected. Sunny fledged last week at the age of 13 weeks old. Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that operates the 24-hour nest cam that is 145 feet up a Jeffrey pine tree, overlooking Big Bear Lake, uses tree names to avoid disclosing information about nest locations and has asked people not to share or solicit information about the habitat's location. The developments of the two young eaglets have been followed closely by wildlife enthusiasts especially after Jackie and Shadow laid three eggs last year that didn't hatch amid a brutal winter storm that covered the nest with snow. Read more: Big Bear eaglet 'hovers' for the first time but still hasn't flown or fledged. What's the difference? Fans of the eagles watched with anticipation last month when Sunny "hovered' over the nest for the first time. The eaglet then flew last week from the nest. Jackie and Shadow will be following the eaglets around, protecting them and helping them find food for a few weeks to a few months, said Sandy Steers, executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that operates the 24-hour nest cam. Eagles don't reach sexual maturity until they're around 4 or 5 years old. The first year of life can be dangerous for an eagle. A juvenile bald eagle has less than a 50% chance of surviving because of its inexperience, according to the American Eagle Foundation. If they survive, they can live 15 to 30 years in the wild. Eaglets usually fledge at 10 to 14 weeks of age. Gizmo is the fifth eaglet from Jackie and Shadow who has fledged. Four have fledged since the camera was installed, according to Steers, which she said is par for the course. The webcam was installed in 2015 and recorded its first nesting season in 2017. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
