San Diego Fire Rescue Recruits Train With Live Burn

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Often it is difficult for fire departments in large cities to do live burn training because of stringent laws or environmental concerns.  For the first time in nearly a decade, San Diego Fire Rescue was recently able to perform a live burn in the former office buildings for the San Diego State University Research Foundation.

San Diego Fire Rescue Assistant Chief of Operations Jeff Carle explains, "Kind of a trade-off for getting to do this live fire, we also are helping the San Diego State Research Foundation get this building down on the ground because they have other plans for the property."

The fire department had several things to do before and during the training in order to be compliant with the city's laws.  They had to put several contracts in place, and were required to control water run-off, keep air pollution to a minimum, and burn only two-thirds of the building due to power line concerns.  Wooden pallets and hay were used to fuel the fire, and accelerants such as gasoline were not used for safety reasons.  Preparations for the training began at 7:00 a.m., and the burn went on into the early evening.

The training was primarily held for San Diego Fire Rescue Fire Academy's newest class of recruits.  Chief Carle explains, "It is state-sponsored training where we use live fire to put situations together to introduce our recruit firefighters to.  We teach them fire behavior, search and rescue, ventilation, and fire attack in real situations, other than it's not an emergency.  It's a situation we've created so that they're better prepared as they get ready to graduate here in the next couple of weeks and go into fire stations.  They will have seen this and done this once for real before they become firefighters and are in the ranks."  He feels that it is extremely beneficial for these new firefighters to experience extinguishing a live fire before responding to an actual emergency.

Tanner Bixler, one of the Fire Academy's recruits, says of the training, "All 39 of us in the fire academy, we've been training and preparing the last 13 weeks, and it's all kind of been in theory.  We would do this theoretically, we would do that, but now we can get a building to burn, and it's great to actually see what everyone has been talking about, and put it to use."

The training was also valuable to San Diego Fire Rescue instructors, as they were able to use it to complete their live burn re-certification.



Author:Deanne Goodman - FDNNTV.com