FLORENCE — Firefighters from the Florence Rural Fire District and 3 Mile Fire Department had the unique opportunity to train on a burning structure Saturday, which provided valuable insight into how actual structure fires behave.
“Real buildings provide a totally different type of fire behavior than controlled buildings, such as the cement bunkers that we burn at training centers. This provides a totally different experience and it's an excellent value for our firefighters,” said Florence Rural Fire District Public Information Officer John Ames.
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Crews began the training by setting individual rooms ablaze and then extinguishing them. It's something that the property owner, Luke Robinson, was happy to see.
"It feels great, the fact that these guys can come out and get the training that they need. And then it helps us out too because we don't need to, I was debating salvaging a lot of this stuff, but a lot of this stuff isn't really salvageable,” said Robinson.
For those battling the blaze during the training, this is a rare real-world situation that provides a mix-up from what training typically looks like.
“A lot of the time when we're training and we've got masks on, we've got packs on, it's not in a live fire environment. And so there's always that extra factor of being ready to go deal with those types of situations,” said Bekah Wick, an EMT for the Florence Rural Fire District.
