Last night we did life fire training with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue at our fire training grounds. Our base has become the airport firefighting training site for Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Charlotte county fire departments. We have two live fire trainers. One is a Class-A fuel burning structural trainer and the other is a Class-B fuel burning aircraft mock up trainer. The pictures I uploaded in the past week is our aircraft trainer. Because of environmental concerns, DoD no longer uses actual jet fuel for training fires on the aircraft trainer. And we have to use approved environmentally friendly Class-A fuels in our structural trainer. Class-A fuels are solid combustibles like paper, wood, etc.. We use pallets and special hey/straw to burn in our structural trainer. We use propane gas in our aircraft trainer. The pictures I uploaded shows almost; as we can get it; realistic fire conditions expected at an aircraft crash site or aircraft that is parked somewhere on the tarmac. We go in fight these fires, person in the tower turns the gas off to the burner of the fire we are fighting so we can knock the fire down or put it out and fight the next fire. Every time these burners are re-lit, the flames get bigger and longer and the heat gets more intense. When I went through the DoD Fire Academy and the airport firefighter course at RIC back in 1990, we saw what real fire behavior would be when they used actual diesel, jet fuel and some aviation gas. We could also use foam to extinguish or darken down the fires. I remember doing my final firefighter training structural live fire burns at the Va. Beach Fire/Rescue training center. IT was a 2.5 story concrete block house, 3 temperature gauges outside to show temperatures inside on each floor. I remember making my way to the second floor with 3 other students on a hand line, locating the fire and be told to stand within 3 feet of the base of the fire before hitting it and knocking it down. Each of us would have to stand there for a couple of minutes to feel how hot it would get. And I remember the last fire they lit, they piled a lot of pallets and hay bales on the second floor in the corner, no one was allowed to enter and go fight fire until the temperature on the fire floor had topped 1000 degrees at the ceiling. Those were the days.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 18:37:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015