Local News

KDKA's Sonni Abatta Goes Through Fire Training

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ― It's one thing to read a story, from the news desk, about an overnight fire.

It's quite another to go into a burning building to experience fighting the fire first hand.

When I got the opportunity to attend Fire Ops 101, a training academy in-kind for some members of the media and government, I knew I had to do it.

The day found me at the fire training academy in North Park--the same facility where firefighter trainees get their start.

There are three structures on the property.

The first is the burn building.

It's a house, empty of furniture, where a "clean" fire (burning hay only) is lit in the corner.

Firefighters learn to train water on the flames.

We walked in, crawled into our spot (it's important to stay low, since temperatures are cooler, the lower you are) and put water on a fire burning in the corner.

Simple enough, except for the fact that you're wearing and carrying 30 pounds of equipment (in the form of clothing and an air tank), and you're sweating it out in 300 degree temperatures.

Before I go on, here's a quick but important note about the fires we were fighting that day.

The differences between our fires and a real fire are two-fold: one, in Fire Ops, our fires are contained to certain areas of the structures and aren't allowed to spread.

Along with our trained personnel, we stayed in very specific places within the buildings, feet from the flames.

The second difference is in the fire itself.

While ours burned "clean," i.e. only hay was used to fuel them, flames are much hotter and dirtier in a real-life fire.

Think about it: myriad household objects are burning--couches, televisions, kitchen appliances, clothes and bedding--and many of these are comprised, at least in part, of synthetic materials.

The resultant fire is much more intense.

So is the smoke.

Several firefighters I talked with say these materials--especially plastics--create a thick black smoke that not only obscures your vision field, but can also itself be as hot as the fire.

The second exercise was the flashover box.

Imagine one long room separated into two different spaces by varying floor levels.

It's all open, but one room is feet above the other.

We sat on benches on the bottom level, watching flames up to a thousand degrees roll inches over our heads.

That second, back room--the raised room--is where the fire was located.

What was rolling over our heads would, in a real-life fire, be rolling on the floor of the burning structure.

The smoke is thick, black, and as hot as the flames that are burning above it.

Now, I've felt hot before, as in noontime-in-Mexico-in-the-middle-of-summer, but nothing compared to this sensation.

We wore air masks and protective clothing, but you could still feel the heat permeating through the gear.

The final leg of our day had us practicing rescue techniques that firefighters use.

In a flame-free building, we did a body rescue, lifting a 160-pound dummy from the ground and carrying it out; carried a folded fire hose up two flights of stairs (the gear totaled 90 pounds); set a ladder against the outside wall of the structure; and dragged a hose up two flights of stairs.

At the very end of the day, we combined the rescue and fire fighting skills we learned into one final exercise, fighting a fire with supervision.

We were sent back into the burn building, two at a time, with two firefighters, and went to work.

This time we dragged our own hose up to the second floor, crawled through the hallway, and used our newly-minted skills to extinguish the fire in the corner.

Firefighting is not work for the weak of mind or body, that's for sure.

And I learned that first hand, when I slept through almost the entire next day, exhausted, and thankful, for sure, that there are highly-trained and capable men and women who volunteer every day to do this job, and do a heck of a job at that.

Here's to them.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

---