Taking advantage of a house near the southern end of South Lumina Avenue set to be demolished, the Wrightsville Beach Fire Department used the structure to stage a simulated fire attack the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 24.
WBFD Captain Matt Holland said 27 firefighters were on hand for the exercise, which allowed them to practice deploying hose lines, ventilating the building, breaching interior walls, personnel accountability and incident command.
“Basically what we did was a simulated fire attack with a smoke machine filling the house, deployed the truck as if the house was on fire and had lights in the kitchen simulating where the fire would be,” Holland said during a Tuesday, Sept. 30 phone interview.
The usual training building for WBFD is a single-story, square cinder block building with four rooms and Holland said having the chance to use an actual house provides vital realistic training scenarios.
“We try to get the most use as we can out of those structures,” he said. “That is why we did some things like breaching the interior walls, which we normally wouldn’t do on a fire attack, just to practice if a fire fighter was trapped in a room. That structure provided an excellent opportunity for those types of scenarios we normally wouldn’t get to do in training.”
Holland said it had been at least one year since WBFD was able to use a house for training, and Wrightsville Beach Fire Chief Frank Smith linked it to the local housing economy.
“Before the recent economic recession we had more opportunities with more houses being torn down for rebuilds,” Smith said Wednesday, Sept. 24. “Now, with the economy improving, we have started to have more chances again.”
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