Firefighting Center Would Fill a Burning Need : Val Verde: Planners envision collapsed buildings, trains leaking make-believe hazardous chemicals and cars tumbling down hillsides.

The brawny men in yellow overalls are the best and the brightest, 35 Los Angeles County Fire Department trainees plucked from an applicant pool of several thousand.

These recruits have been waiting up to seven years for the chance to enter a training program right out of Dante: six weeks of grueling drills punctuated by frequent close encounters with whirling balls of fire.

But Capt. Paul Schuster is concerned that even this intensive training will not prepare the young firefighters for the realities of their chosen career, which is likely to include contact with chemical warehouse fires, train derailments, earthquakes and fiery car crashes.

“I remember being sent out on my first hazardous materials incident when I was with an engine company,” Schuster said last week. “It’s the scariest thing if you really don’t have any training for it.”

At his department’s urging, Schuster helped design a plan for a 160-acre regional firefighting center on land the department owns near Six Flags Magic Mountain. The land is now occupied by a small county fire school.

As Schuster envisions it, this “Disneyland for Firefighters” would include such full-scale disasters as collapsed buildings, real trains leaking pretend hazardous chemicals or gases, and cars tumbling down hillsides.

The sprawling campus also would include formal classrooms and some of the more traditional training props such as reinforced buildings that can be burned over and over again. It would be open to rookies and veterans alike.

If completed as proposed, it would be one of the largest fire training facilities in the United States and by far the biggest in California. Preliminary plans call for operating costs to be offset by charging daily use fees to surrounding city and county fire departments and private industries interested in state-of-the-art training for their employees.

The ambitious plan is not without obstacles, including accommodating old oil company pipes that crisscross the rural acreage and, most notably, convincing the county and state to provide the funding for construction, so far only vaguely estimated by Schuster at several million dollars.

Fresh with sweat and a singed fire-resistant hood after extinguishing a gasoline fire at the existing training facility, trainee David Broadwell, 24, spoke about the need for the more diverse and up-to-date training. Broadwell decided to become a firefighter at the age of 8 when his father, an Arcadia fire captain, was killed while fighting a fire.

“He fell through a roof of an industrial building that manufactured solvents,” Broadwell said. “The solvents had eroded the roof and it collapsed. . . . It just makes me want to learn more.”

State fire officials agreed with Broadwell, saying good hazardous materials instruction is hard to come by and hands-on training is the key. They predicted the center would attract firefighters from throughout the state and beyond.

“When the training is there and available, other agencies will take advantage of it,” said Dan Terry, president of California Professional Firefighters, a statewide labor organization representing 20,000 firefighters.

Currently, Los Angeles County has two fire training facilities, a structure-fire center in East Los Angeles called “the grinder” by exhausted recruits, and a flammable liquids (unleaded gasoline) and gases (propane) training center west of the Golden State Freeway near Val Verde, where the construction is planned. For brush-fire training, they use wild land at Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho, a county jail in Castaic.

Increasingly, firefighters are the first people to arrive at any disaster and often the scope of the disaster exceeds their knowledge, state and national fire officials said.

“There are no more fire departments that go to fires only--they’re the first responders to all kinds of things,” said Bill Teie, deputy director of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “They go to medical problems, they go to hazardous materials spills. They don’t go to cats caught in trees.”

Those who praised the proposed center said more extensive and realistic training could have helped speed evacuation of victims during major earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City.

They said better training might have lessened the severity of such chemical disasters as:

* A Southern Pacific tanker car that in June spilled as much as 19,000 gallons of a toxic pesticide into the Sacramento River, wiping out aquatic life and sickening residents. Legislators who represent the area have suggested that local firefighters, health workers and law enforcement officials first on the scene might have been able to slow the plume’s spread if they had known how.

* A small fire in 1988 at a highway construction site that turned into a major explosion when it ignited 40,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, killing six Kansas City, Mo., firefighters. At that time federal officials said better preparation might have led firefighters to realize the danger they were in.

Competition is stiff for the firefighter positions with Los Angeles County, where entry-level trainees get paid more than $2,700 a month and promotional opportunities are plentiful. That means that many recruits have years of experience, either through jobs with other fire departments or through volunteer firefighting.

But even experienced firefighters here and elsewhere have learned most of what they know about how to handle hazardous materials on the job, fire officials said. Since every chemical reacts differently when ignited or combined with other chemicals, state and federal fire officials say such circumstantial training is woefully inadequate.

“There’s so many more of the hazardous materials out there, manufacturers keep coming up with products that were heretofore unknown,” said Roger Lanahan, assistant administrator of the U.S. Fire Administration. “No department can say they won’t suffer a hazardous materials incident because trucks and trains go through every community. Even a little, idyllic area might be hit with a terrible problem.”

Although most fire departments have access to burning training towers and flaming pools of gasoline, instruction in hazardous materials and disaster preparedness is usually limited to the classroom.

Only a public fire training school in Pueblo, Colo., and one run by the New York City Fire Department approach the scale of Los Angeles County’s plans. Smaller comprehensive centers exist at Texas A&M; University and the University of Nevada at Reno, and one at Shasta College in Northern California is in the planning stages.

Most other programs emphasize one or two of the areas. For instance, the California State Training Institute in San Luis Obispo specializes in hazardous materials training of firefighters as well as police and other emergency personnel. The National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md., run by the U.S. Fire Administration, offers primarily classes and laboratory experiments on fire behavior.

So far, there has been no opposition to the proposal to phase in the Los Angeles County center over the next decade. The County Board of Supervisors previously agreed to pay $200,000 to plan the site and conduct environmental reviews. In October, supervisors will be asked to approve spending $600,000 more of Fire Department funds to design the buildings and locate the props, such as derailed trains and burning tanker trucks.

The state fire marshal has agreed to help with the project and is currently negotiating with College of the Canyons to begin offering the academic fire courses there, to improve the center’s ability to attract firefighters from throughout the state even before the on-site classrooms are built.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has tentatively agreed to the plans, under an exemption for fire training, after it learned that in place of hazardous materials the Fire Department would use inert gases and colored liquid.

Union Oil Co., which built a small fire training school on the Val Verde site and still owns mineral rights on all of the county’s land there, is working with Schuster to identify which of the dozens of oil pipelines are operational and what older pipes and pits might contain.

Even area residents seem largely supportive of the expansion plan, despite the fact that it will mean more days when their view is partially obscured by grimy clouds.

“Smoke is something that’s very visible, but it turns out to not be nearly as bad for you as things that you can’t see,” said Mike Kotch, head of the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment.

Those who live closest to the site, in Val Verde, even see some advantages to having a constant flow of firefighter trainees nearby.

“The smoke seems to dissipate before it gets here and we were happy that the land was going to be used for a fire college as opposed to being sold and developed,” said Edwin Seth Brown, president of the Val Verde Civic Assn. “With an industrial park being planned close to us . . . it makes sense to have a place that has so much equipment and trained staff close by to aid the community in case of an emergency.”