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Where there's smoke...
It took less than two minutes for a few flames to erupt into a nearly out-of-control inferno.
Sitting across what was once a living room, four rookie firefighters watched the fire rapidly engulf the kitchen cabinets before spreading across the ceiling. Blinding clouds of thick, lethal, gray smoke engulfed the room and seeped outside before firefighters doused the blaze.
Stepping out into the icy night air, the firefighters pulled off their helmets and removed their air masks, knowing they won this battle with a minimum of damage.
Next time, however, they may not be so lucky.
It's this harsh reality that prompted the department to gather in force at an abandoned mobile home near Bastida's Towing on Sunset Strip last Thursday. For more than two hours, they held two live exercises that included setting fires in two rooms.
The goal was to familiarize crews on how to fight those blazes and see first-hand how unpredictable the fires can get, according to city Fire Chief Phil Gridley.
"We don't often get a chance to do live fire training," the chief added. "Most of the time, we're dealing with the real thing."
Hands-on exercises like this give the department "vital training" unavailable through other means, according to one of the station's experienced firefighters.
Using an actual structure provides unique benefits the station can't replicate in its fire training simulator, Gridley added. The mobile home is much larger than the simulator, requiring crews to crawl through more places to get at the flames.
Thursday's fires also reached more realistic temperatures -- a blistering 1,200 degrees fahrenheit.
"We can build it hotter, which is important" from a training perspective, the chief said.
For the station's newest crewmen, who joined the department March 1, it showed them exactly how hot structural fires get when they're trying to fight them. In addition, they had to deal with blinding smoke that blocked their view, forcing them to rely on their training to combat the blaze.
Last week's scenarios started with a kitchen fire caused by unattended cooking -- the number one cause of fires each year in the United States, Gridley said.
Training crews then set the second blaze in a back bedroom to simulate another common starting point for house fires.
Circumstances during last week's exercises favored the firefighters. The station's training staff spent days "working their tails off" to script each scenario with lengthy safety briefings preceding both planned fires, Gridley said. Most of the department's 32 firefighters and support vehicles remained on scene to keep the situation under control.
Despite the smoke and fire damage, the department has additional plans for the mobile home, Gridley said. In two weeks, the station plans to set additional fires there to provide even more training for its crews. That includes an arson scenario to prompt crewmen to determine the cause of the fire and where it originated.
Once the trailer is deemed unsafe for further training, the department plans one final exercise involving a full-blown blaze, giving the station's firefighters one more chance to hone their skills before the building is reduced to ash.
"We'd like to use it as long as possible," Gridley said.
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