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Live burning exercises: ‘best kind of training’
By ALEXANDRA CALDWELL
| Article published on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 |
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| Photo by ALEXANDRA CALDWELL |
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| Habitat for Humanity of Pinellas County allowed Clearwater Fire and Rescue and other local fire departments to practice live burn training on the former Homer Villas before their demolition. |
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CLEARWATER – In a rare opportunity, all 180 members of the Clearwater Fire and Rescue participated in live burn exercises in the past two weeks.
The former Homer Villas at 1884 N. Betty Lane in Clearwater were bought by Habitat for Humanity of Pinellas County and will be demolished to turn the development into a mixed-income community. Before demolition, Habitat for Humanity let Clearwater Fire and Rescue train in the 61-unit housing complex, culminating in controlled live burns.
“This is very rare. Very rare,” said Richard Riley, operations chief for Clearwater Fire and Rescue. “We’ve been extremely fortunate in the last couple of years in the city and we’ve maybe had one structure a year. This is a gold mine. This is a diamond in the rough to have this many structures and letting us have the opportunity to burn them.”
Usually about six fire companies would share a single building and there would be limited rooms to burn, Riley said. But with so many houses in Homer Villas, everyone in the Clearwater department as well as the Dunedin and Palm Harbor departments got to train. The training opportunity was unprecedented in Pinellas County, Riley said. He guessed that they burned about 16 houses by the end of training.
Live fire training is rare because the property owners must give the department permission to use the structure, said Elizabeth Daly-Watts, Clearwater public safety spokeswoman. This is the closest the department can get to a real house fire.
Firefighters practiced hose management, extinguishment, search and rescue with mannequins, and ventilation. There are some differences between live burns and a real structure fire, Riley said, due to state and national rules and statutes to ensure firefighters’ safety.
In controlled situations there isn’t the hurried setup of hoses and fast entrance into the building, he said. Everything is laid out ahead of time. They can only set one fire in one room at a time using palates of hay and straw. Also, there are no plastics or furniture inside the house, and all the glass and window fixtures are removed. The windows are covered with a piece of plywood secured with a single screw, and one corner of the wood was cut off to ensure a quick, safe emergency exit. Furthermore, the bottoms of all the doors are cut off so hoses cannot get pinched and the exits are more visible.
Despite these precautions, firefighters agree this type of training is as close as they can get to the real deal.
“This gives us a realistic approach of how the smoke will bank down, how it will react inside a building, where the extension will go, which you can’t really simulate unless you’re in a live burn,” said Jim Groth, from Engine 48 of Clearwater Fire and Rescue. “It is controlled now, it’s not too dangerous, but it’s the best kind of training that we can have.”
From May 12 through May 25, including weekends, the firefighters trained in four-hour shifts at the housing development, getting every firefighter through each position twice. On a regular day of work, each shift trains for at least two hours, using theatrical smoke or darkness to simulate the limited visibility of fires. But the live burn exposed the firefighters to the heat that they can’t get in simulations.
“This gives us a more realistic approach of what we could face on any given day,” Groth said.
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Article published on Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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