Conn. city launches rehabbed fire academy

By William Kaempffer
The New Haven Register

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Crawling on hands and knees in pitch darkness, you can hear the muffled crackling of the unseen fire in the cinder-block bunker. You feel the searing dry heat — at the ceiling in excess of 1,200 degrees — through your turn-out gear. And despite protective clothing, your ears and neck burn.

It was, quite literally, baptism by fire.

"This is one-one thousandth of what it's like at a real fire," observed Fire Chief Michael Grant. "These are not the real conditions, believe me."

"It gives (trainees) the sense of what they could expect at a fire though."

About 35 probationary firefighters from New Haven, West Haven and the Connecticut Fire Academy went through evolutions Tuesday at New Haven Regional Fire Training Academy, which recently received a $4.5 million overhaul through a grant from the state.

The centerpiece of the training grounds is a new 2 1/2 story "Class A" burn building — one of only two in Connecticut — where trainers can give recruits live-fire training.

It was constructed to resemble a 2 1/2 story wood framed home, the type of occupancy you most often would see in New Haven, but the resemblance ends there. More than 20 heat sensors built into in different areas of the building measure interior temperatures to the thousandth of a degree. Plywood on the roof allows firefighters to practice ventilation with chain saws. Through most of the day, recruits practiced lugging charged hoses up and down an exterior staircase to attack second- and third-floor controlled blazes.

Inside, it is hot, dark, disorienting.

From a training perspective, fire Capt. Matthew Marcarelli, city director of training, the newly improved training ground has proven invaluable. In the classroom and with hands-on mechanical exercises, recruits learn and practice tools and skills they will need on the job. Marcarelli acknowledged that, early in training and in isolation, probationary firefighters might wonder the purpose of some of the lessons.

"They learn all these little bits and pieces of information and they wonder, 'Why do we have to know this?' We always tell them that there's going to come a time in your training when you'll understand why we do all of this."

It is all tied together in the 4,300-square-foot burn building as recruits drag hoses, conduct search and rescues and put out a pile after pile of burning pallets and hay deep in its bowels. But Marcarelli said the burns also let firefighters observe how a fire behaves and how it interacts with a building "so they can learn when it's time to get out."

The department permitted a Register reporter and photographer to don turn-out gear, air packs and masks and experience the burn building first hand.

Before hand, Marcarelli explained what to expect: People usually feel claustrophobic. It will be pitch black, until it's not anymore in a room filled with fire. Temperatures near the floor will be between 200 and 300 degrees. Toward the ceiling, it will be more than 1,000, so stay low. And once the charged hoses let loose, the dry heat will instantaneously transform into an uncomfortable, humid heat as water hitting the fire and hot air vaporizes and turns the room into a monumental sauna.

"The fire don't bother me," said Louis Oliwa, a nine-year veteran of the department on Squad 1 temporarily assigned to the academy as an adjunct instructor and taking recruits through drills. "It's the steam."

In addition to the burn building, state funding created stations to train for confined space entry, trench rescue and flashover flash- over simulation at the academy.

A flashover is the near simultaneous ignition of all combustible material in an enclosed area and can occur when superheated gasses reach a flashpoint, usually in excess of 1,100 degrees.

"It's really hard to describe what it feels like," said probationary firefighter Ryan Almeida, 21. He joined the city department after working as a paramedic for American Medical Response in Bridgeport. Almeida had conducted mock search-and- rescue operations under fire but Tuesday was his first to work a hose line in a real fire.

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