Fake fire heats up disaster training

It was not designated as such on any calendar, but I recently experienced my first Firefighter Appreciation Day. I declared it for myself after having an eye-opening experience inside a burning building.

OK, so the structure was not really burning down. It was a highly controlled drill with disciplined flames and a harmless form of smoke contained inside the practice structure at the Overland Park Fire Training Complex.

But it was as genuine a fire as ever I care to be choked and gagged by.

Seven county fire departments teamed up that night for the kind of drill that periodically takes place at the complex to assure that everybody will be well-prepared and on the same page when they work together someday fighting the real thing.

This session’s emphasis was on managing a two- to three-alarm fire, or, in layman’s terms, a really big blaze.

“The focus is on chain of command and keeping it organized and keeping it from getting chaotic,” said Lenexa Battalion Chief Eric Ramsey, who oversaw command post operations.

Over the course of the evening, I heard a lot of other references to that C word, “chaos.” As in, do not let it happen.

Civilians are forgiven if they lose their cool during a disaster, but panic and confusion have no place among firefighting ranks.

Still, achieving calm in the face of disaster can even challenge the pros. And after getting a tiny taste of the smoke and the hazardous action involved in this profession, it was easy to understand how chaos can enter into these things.

Before one of the drills got under way, I was ushered inside a soon-to-be-torched room by Overland Park Training Chief Greg Wilson and department Public Information Officer Jason Rhodes. Wilson hung close at my side to explain what was going on, and no doubt to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.

As we entered, an unseen smoke machine already had churned out a soupy haze, and a natural gas flame-making apparatus was blowing out test blasts of impressive dimensions.

A couple of incident victims, in the form of test dummies, lay lifeless underfoot. Some inconveniently positioned furnishings were scattered here and there.

This isn’t so scary, I thought.

Wilson gently suggested that I might want to slip around a nearby corner in case one of the firefighters soon to enter the room decided to train a hose in our direction.

OK, so maybe that was a little intimidating. But I figured good ol’ Greg was just being a bit overprotective.

Then, just before the fire crews were given the go-ahead to burst in, the smoke intensity was heightened to a thick goo, and a wide bank of flames roared to ceiling height on the other side of the room.

Feeling as though my eyebrows surely must have just evaporated, I turned my face away and huddled deeper into my corner. Uh, Greg, next time you hand out warnings to a guest you might want to mention the freaking blast furnace.

The drill might have been all synthetic smoke and contained blaze, but it quickly sucked most of the oxygen out of the room just the same.

Then, rather suddenly, it was over. The room was vented, we could almost see clearly again, and the gag reflex abated.

This all transpired in minutes. Genuine structure fires of great intensity, of course, are not so easily discouraged and tamed.

I told Wilson that even knowing this event was staged, I certainly got a sense of the fear and disorientation a fire can create.

He told me about a training room next door that contains a maze. Firefighters are sent in there with full gear, and the smoke machines are cranked into high-density mode. The object of the ensuing serious game is to find a way out. Not everybody does. Even well-trained professionals can lose their way.

Few things, I thought, probably are more frightening than suddenly being struck blind. Unless, of course, it is being struck blind inside a burning building. And that basically is what these guys must learn to expect and to calmly and coolly cope with.

For another training exercise conducted that night, I was allowed to observe the nerve center of the firefighting operations set up inside the county’s mobile command unit.

The unit, which is rolled out only for large-scale emergencies, basically is a recreational vehicle on steroids, with audio, visual and office equipment crammed inside. Incident commanders sit at a table, and with the help of a dispatcher receive constant radio reports from four or five supervisors overseeing operations at the fire scene. The commanders cannot see the fire, or even the burning building.

“It’s important for the incident command team to be a little removed from the action. The noise can distract them, so it’s good to be away from that so they can focus,” Ramsey said.

As the drills illustrated, firefighting is much more complex and rigorous than just pointing a hose at hot spots. In addition to the elaborate staged scenarios, most area firefighters train almost every day.

And as impressive as the firefighting facility might be, Wilson said some things cannot be duplicated inside this controlled concrete environment. In a real fire, temperatures can approach 1,000 degrees and the smoke devours all the oxygen, not just some of it. In a real fire, if you pull off the mask foolishly thinking you will get more oxygen, the blazing-hot caustic fumes will kill you. In a real fire, Wilson said, firefighter learn to sense problems and hazards just by the look and feel of things that do not exist in the drills.

Wilson said 10 firefighters in the U.S. die in training exercises each year. Not a big number perhaps, but how many professions lose a single person in any year during training exercises or refresher courses?

Having experienced my firefighter appreciation day, I vowed to be more dutiful in the future about replacing those smoke detector batteries. More than ever, I have no desire to smell, see, taste or feel the real thing. At the same time, I found it more than a little comforting to be reminded that people exist out there who work and live to do just that.

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