Real Flames, Fake Emergencies for Texas Firefighter Trainees

The smoke is thick, blinding, as the firefighters grope their way through the house. They find a body in the back room and carry it outside, hoping that they’re not too late.

The reinforcements go in, but no one can find the fire. Several minutes later, they open the door to the garage and see a car ablaze. In the blink of an eye, those flames are extinguished.

“That’s OK, guys. Come back out and we’ll go over what you did right and wrong,” a voice calls from outside.

The flames are real, but the emergency is not.

The computer-controlled, gas-fueled fire at Tarrant County College’s new $17-million Fire Service Training Center mimics the heat, smells, sounds and conditions that might be found at a real fire. This one teaches them how to get the victims out, extinguish the fire and escape.

“You’re supposed to practice like you play, and as realistic as these buildings are, we can do that,” said Mark Hunka, a Fort Worth Fire Department training officer who recently led his crews in night drills.

American firefighters raced to 1.7 million blazes, including forest fires, in 2000; 102 perished in the flames.

In its effort to help reduce those numbers, the training center seems all too real.

It sits on 23 acres on the college campus and has the look of a working-class neighborhood. An 18-wheeler is parked outside a small warehouse. There’s a tower that reaches up six stories, a two-story apartment building, a strip mall, and one- and two-story houses with an alley behind the fences.

The gray concrete-block buildings are mostly empty except for some metal pieces resembling couches, beds, stoves, desks and other furniture, and flame-retardant, weighted dummies. Some interior walls can be moved so that repeat trainees cannot memorize the layouts.

An instructor programs a computer to set fires in designated areas, using technology similar to a pilot light in a gas stove. The instructor controls how high and how hot the flames burn, making conditions more intense when veteran firefighters are training.

Trainees wait for calls in a building resembling a fire station, where they pass the time mopping and waxing the floors. They board a firetruck for the ride to the hot spot when they get the call.

“When students go in, if they don’t put the right stream in the right place, it won’t go out,” said Ted Phillips, chairman of the college’s Public Safety Institute. “And we give them a computer printout of what they did wrong and right, so there’s immediate feedback.”

During training in the one-story house, the computer sensor shut down the garage fire because it went unextinguished for more than four minutes. Air vents opened automatically because the room exceeded 500 degrees, another safety measure in the system.

“The men chose to find the victim and remove it rather than put out the fire first,” said fire Lt. Rodney Smith, a coordinator at the fire-training center and firefighter in nearby Arlington. “The goal is saving lives first, and they found the victim.”

Smith and other instructors were in a control room overlooking the neighborhood to monitor computer readings of heat, gas levels and other data from the burning rooms. They watched images from a thermal imaging camera that videotaped the firefighters in the house.

The fire technology is from Symtron Systems, a Fair Lawn, N.J.-based company that has done similar work for 160 other fire-training centers nationwide. The Fort Worth center is the largest.

Symtron developed the technology 23 years ago for simulators for the U.S. Navy, and now works with government agencies and colleges that provide firefighter training, company spokesman Louis Orotelli said.

Under Texas law, firefighter recruits must complete 468 hours of basic fire protection training at a certified academy -- including the Fort Worth center. They’re also required to pass an exam and obtain emergency medical certification.

Tarrant County College is one of dozens of state-approved fire training sites in the state.

The two-year college has offered a fire technology program since the 1970s.

For hands-on training, the college rented a building or tower in nearby cities.

But the thick, black smoke from burning hay and wood hurt the environment, and only a few students could be trained in one day because of delays in cleaning and drying the waterlogged areas.

Over the years, the program developed into an associate’s degree for students.

And college officials, realizing that the region needed a large, innovative training center, created one. Fire departments must pay to use it; students use it separately as part of their college curriculum.

Trainees gain valuable experience in water rescues, trench collapses and hazardous materials spills. A car can be placed in a concrete channel while 80,000 gallons of water is pumped through -- a simulation of flash flooding.

“We wanted to create as many scenarios as we could,” Phillips said.

Before the training center opened in October, firefighters would train at the water rides at Six Flags Over Texas amusement park in Arlington. Inevitably, they would get hurt because they were thrown against rocks.

“Here,” Phillips said, “we have more control.”