Superior Firefighters tweaked and tested fire tactics this week during live fire training at a home on North 12th Street.
For three days, firefighting teams rotated through, taking turns entering the house, suppressing the fire and removing smoldering pieces to prevent it from rekindling.
"Getting to do live fire training is invaluable," Battalion Chief Howard Huber said Tuesday. "There's no substitute for getting practice on the real thing."
The building, which will be demolished following the training, is a good example of the city's older housing stock, he said. The house was donated by National Bank of Commerce.
The department has a lot of young firefighters. According to Battalion Chief Scott Gordon, 11 of the department's 37 firefighters have been hired since 2015; four of them were hired this year.
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"People get promoted into new roles, new firefighters come on," Huber said. "The more we train together like this, the better."
This week's live burn was the firefighter equivalent of a football training camp.
"When we show up on scene, we have a coordinated attack already planned, like a play in football," Huber said. "We all have different roles. We like to have as many of those plays in our book as we can."
"This is a chance for us to learn a new play, basically, to add to our repertoire," Huber said.
Gordon said the crews are testing out a way to tackle fire situations in which positive pressure attack ventilation techniques can't be used.
The majority of calls firefighters respond to are medical, not fires. According to department records, 29 of the 3,758 calls the department responded to in 2016 were structure fires, while 2,928 were medical runs. Live fire training, helps them keep their skills sharp in a real-world setting.
"These opportunities are pretty rare for us, so we appreciate getting to do this today," Huber said.
In addition to donating the house, National Bank of Commerce also paid for asbestos removal in the kitchen to make it safe for the firefighters. Campbell Lumber donated the materials needed to make the rooms burnable.
"We have to fill the house up with sheetrock and other things to make sure the fire doesn't spread away from where we want it," Huber said.
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Bruce Thompson, community bank president with National Bank of Commerce, said they learned of the need for house donations from a staff member who took part in the fire department's Fire Ops 101 community outreach event. The bank had purchased the house with the intent to demolish it, so they offered it to firefighters first.
"They're very good at what they do, but a live circumstance is not easy to replicate, and so that's why the opportunity arose and they took us up on it," Thompson said. "It's a community partnership just to make everybody better and, ultimately, the neighborhood will have a little more green space."
