Firefighters Stage ‘Live Burn’ Training Session At Vacant House

By Andrew Gorosko

About 45 firefighters turned out on Saturday, January 28, at a vacant house on Mt Pleasant Road, where local fire officials conducted the largest “live burn” fire training session held in the past several years to familiarize fire personnel with the conditions that they would face at structure fires.

Newtown Hook & Ladder, Hawleyville, Sandy Hook, Dodgingtown, and Botsford volunteers participated in the event designed to provide a range of realistic fire training situations, explained Hook & Ladder Chief Jason Rivera, who oversaw the project.

Although the Mt Pleasant Road site is within Hawleyville’s fire district, the owner of the property granted Hook & Ladder permission to do the destructive training on the old house there, Chief Rivera said. Hook & Ladder invited the four other volunteer fire companies to the session.

Chief Rivera said that the fire companies will continue training at the site for about another two months. The three-bedroom house was built in 1949.

“It’s a very large project,” he said of the training event, noting that one dozen fire instructors were present. They included several Hook & Ladder staffers and instructors from other areas in the state.

The session was designed to train firefighters about managing water supplies, handling fire hoses, using fire hose nozzles, handling ground ladders and aerial ladders, conducting search-and-rescue operations, and using “rapid intervention teams” to rescue firefighters who get into trouble at fires.

“There’s really no better training than realistic training and this is as realistic as it gets,” Chief Rivera said.

To aid firefighters’ communications while training, they are equipped with portable two-way radios.

In a future training session at the site, firefighters plan to completely burn down the vacant house, Chief Rivera said. That situation would provide firefighters with practice on “exterior operations,” he noted.

The multiple training sequences held on January 28 involved creating four relatively small fires in sections of the house.

Firefighters entered the building wearing air supplies and carrying charged fire hoses to extinguish those four blazes on the first and second stories.

“Everybody was very pleased with the training,” the fire chief said.