Scott County: Smoky training: Crawl, walk, run

For a rookie firefighter, practice makes perfect -- and basic safety skills come first -- when it comes to learning how to navigate a burning building. ¶ "It's crawl, walk, run," said Greg Hayes, a firefighter with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community who led the first training this month in a brand-new burn tower outside Jordan. ¶ Opportunities for safe, realistic practice can be hard to come by if you're a firefighter. Even the classic training exercise, where the fire chief puts a match to an unwanted house, comes with risks, and many volunteer fire departments consider themselves lucky if they get their hands on one real house to torch in a year.

But in a high-tech facility like Scott County's new tactical tower, gas burners allow firefighters to put out a real blaze (accented with theater smoke) that trainers can extinguish or reignite in a snap. The tower has four kinds of staircases, movable walls and four stories of rooms that police as well as firefighters throughout the region can use to practice apprehending suspects and rescuing victims.

The tower is the crown jewel of the new public safety training center, which opened this spring and includes classrooms and two shooting ranges at a historic building that has, in the past century, served as a jail annex, Catholic retreat, treatment center for alcoholics and luxury hotel.

The center, which got its second million-dollar shot of legislative aid this session, is one of half a dozen regional facilities the state has helped fund in the past decade to improve training for firefighters, police and emergency responders.

Infinite number of scenarios

On a sunny morning in early May, Hayes' team clustered around a fire truck parked outside the tower for their instructions. The group, an Indiana civil support team trained to respond to weapons of mass destruction, doesn't fight blazes regularly, but they went through what Hayes calls "the reality TV show of how to become a firefighter": six months' worth of training, crammed into two weeks. In just a few days, he said, "We've been through this building 10 times, at least."

The tower can simulate all kinds of blazes: One burner can fake grease fires, while another, housed in a high-ceilinged room with a staircase leading down from the second floor, provides practice with warehouse or basement infernos. There's a balcony with a sliding door for condo rescues, and hatches in some ceilings where firefighters can practice chopping through wood barriers.

"It's almost an infinite number of scenarios these guys can create in here," said Don Fehr, Scott County's facilities manager.

The task for the trainees was a basement apartment fire. Hayes and other group leaders had planted a 165-pound dummy as a victim and set up a maze of walls in several dark, smoke-filled rooms that led to the second floor, then back down to the blaze.

Go into the building, Hayes told the Indiana group, and pick one of two doors. "This should just be a touch more difficult than yesterday," he said.

The group donned hoods and air masks while a trainer flipped a switch, igniting a burner. Some of the trainees manned a nearby hydrant, and water surged through a hose to several others waiting at the building. At a signal broadcast on their radios, they opened a door. Smoke poured out. They headed in.

Building towers close to home

The push in Minnesota for regional training centers heated up in 1999 with a task force that studied the issue, said Tim Leslie, assistant commissioner with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.

That campaign got a major boost this session with $5 million for a statewide facility at Camp Ripley, southwest of Brainerd, where a whole city's worth of public officials will be able to practice handling major disasters using computer simulation software.

The 1999 task force also found a need for eight regional sites for practice at skills such as shooting and firefighting. Not all have been built, Leslie said, but state leaders have allocated funding for centers scattered in places such as Edina, Marshall and Rochester that complement the facilities that some cities like Minneapolis run for their own departments.

The challenge with fire training in particular, he said, is getting burn towers close enough to a fire department's home base. A police officer could drive a squad car 100 miles to a shooting range if he had to, but driving a fire truck any distance is no picnic, fuel mileage is woeful and small-town volunteer firefighters have a strong interest in being close to home in case a real fire call comes in while they're training.

"You want to draw circles of 100 miles around the training centers," Leslie said. "We need to look at the northern part of the state, but everything else is pretty well covered" once the Camp Ripley facility is up and running in less than two years.

The Jordan center, which has $8.5 million in capital funding, will be used primarily by about a dozen local governments in Scott and Carver counties that are pitching in for much of its cost, but outside groups also can rent it.

A chance for a re-do

Inside the burn tower, things went a tad off course for the Indiana team: Instead of picking a door, the group got so excited that it headed straight up a nearby staircase, bypassing the obstacle course and dousing the flames more easily than Hayes intended.

"That's OK," he said as the group rolled up the hose and gathered for a critique. "We'll give them a little more training."

"I know the stairs are attractive and the easy way to the second floor," he told the reassembled team. "We want you to go the hard way."

And the team suited up to do it again.

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016