SUNDRE – There was far more involved in a Sundre Fire Department live structure fire training exercise than merely extinguishing the flames and calling it a day.
The 17 members of the local department who on Saturday, March 25 participated in the drill that was conducted on a donated Bergen-area structure spent the entire day refining their repertoire of life-saving skills.
“We had a house donated to us for use of live training,” said Chief Ross Clews.
“We were able to do multi-runs on it to demonstrate ventilation, wall breaches, door breaches, proper window removal techniques, demonstrate thermal stratification (how a fire behaves), and searches in smoke-filled buildings,” he said.
“We fill it with smoke repeatedly, clear the smoke out with ventilation techniques, then we do small fires on search and attack with different crews.”
The fire is eventually allowed to consume the whole structure in a controlled manner, along the way demonstrating the different stages of a blaze’s progression from incipient to free burning and finally smouldering, he said.
“We let it burn down to the ground,” he said, adding the exercises benefit both the members who receive invaluable training on a live structure fire as well as the donors who might need the structure demolished.
“It’s easier for them even to dispose of it; so, it does them a favour,” he said.
The department generally attempts to line up arrangements to carry out live structure fire training sessions on donated buildings about once or twice a year, he said.
“They’re always donated buildings,” he said, adding another house south of Sundre was also donated to the department for training purposes.
A date for that training had as of the end of March not yet been set.
