The program, carried out by the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, Alberta, focused on crisis management and communication, managing wildfires, and incident command systems.
The exchange program follows a “train the trainer” model, and the officers who took part will pass the skills and knowledge they gained along to their peers back home. The program was supported in full by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) as part of a 2018 SNF grant to the Hellenic Fire Corps that included several training programs, the procurement of personal protective equipment, and construction of the newly opened SNF Training Center on the outskirts of Athens.
Other trainings have taken firefighters from Greece to Spain to learn about aerial firefighting techniques and to the UK to cover topics including hazardous materials fires.