Firefighters go through intense training their entire careers, but one of the most valuable training opportunities for these men and women come from exercises in real homes. Saturday morning, West End Fire & Rescue hosted multiple agencies from three different counties to an acquired structure burn exercise on Bowman Road outside of Foxfire.
Firefighters from West End, Eagle Springs, Seven Lakes, Pinebluff, Derby, and North West Pocket gathered at the empty house around 8 a.m. After a brief safety meeting, walk through, and prayer, instructors lit props that consisted of hay and wood pallets set up in each room on fire. Once the flames consumed the room, a team of firefighters would go into the structure and put their knowledge into action to extinguish the blaze. Once one team accomplished putting the fire out, the props were re-lit and another team would go in with the same goal of extinguishing the fire. Each room brought the teams unique challenges.
“In my opinion, an acquired structure burn may be the most valuable training opportunity we can present to new firefighters,” West End Assistant Fire Chief Austin Hubbard told Moore County News. “It’s a time that they can put all the basics they have been taught together at once and feel a sense of accomplishment when they go in and actually knock the fire back successfully. It builds their confidence up to where they are equipped mentally to tackle an actual non-training fire.”
Training in an acquired structure burn can be quite different from the training seen in buildings engineered for fire exercises. According to Hubbard, those buildings “are built with a lot of safety features and limitations so they last for years. The size of those buildings often allows for the smoke to behave less realistically.”
West End firefighter Riley Gibson wore a fire camera on his helmet during the training. As soon as he enters the structure, everything just goes dark. Hubbard says that in an acquired structure burn, “we have the opportunity to make the fires more realistic, the smoke and heat also behaves as it would in a real fire. You also have situations where fire can move into the attic or other rooms if you don’t attack it correctly.” Factors like these are the reason Hubbard says this kind of training exercise is more realistic than an engineered burn building.
Fire departments are always looking for opportunities for training exercises that utilize real-life burning structures. As in many of these events, today’s structure on Bowman Road was donated by the home owner that plans to tear down the old structure used for the training, and building a new house on the land. The owner said he comes from a family of first responders, and felt this was a good opportunity to help the community.
