By MATT PIKE
Last year, the St. Joseph Fire Department secured grant money to build a new fire training facility and hope to soon have that facility established and ready to go.
St. Joseph Fire Chief Ivan Klippenstein says the grant was secured working alongside the 139th Airlift Group at Rosecrans Memorial Airport, and the facility will allow both crews to train in live fire exercises.
"Which is not only excellent for especially our young crews, which we have much of, we're a very young department, gives us the opportunity to see in a live fire exercise what they're capabilities are and what they might lack," Klippenstein says on the KFEQmunnity show. "The guard base also gets an opportunity to participate in that and hopefully we'll be able to do some more stuff with some rural departments around the way and make that a good useful facility for the region."
Klippenstein says getting training like this before was nearly impossible for his young department
"And this is going to be the first opportunity that we can do it without hiring somebody to bring something, which we did last summer, and that works ok, it's expensive and we run through it pretty fast," Klippenstein explains. "But this will give us the opportunity to do it more frequently obviously, and work on things that maybe we see if there's trouble in individuals or groups, we can make changes in what we do."
Klippenstein says the facility is broken up into several segments, the first being a room with a prop of burning wood and smoke, where firefighters will enter and mostly extinguish the fire
"I say mostly because they'll back up and we'll bring somebody else in," Klippenstein says. "There's another option in which we can keep firefighters in place with their gear and it's a flashover prop, so it's something when everything in the room catches on fire, and that includes the smoke, but what we need to teach anybody who hasn't experienced that is what that looks like so you know how to remove yourself or protect yourself from that happening to you."
Klippenstein says there is also a second floor to practice entering upstairs and fighting a bedroom fire, as well as stairs outside to act as if the bottom floor is a basement to practice fighting basement fires.
Klippenstein says while the facility is wonderful for the training aspect, it's also a wonderful opportunity to be able to do more things alongside the 139th Airlift Wing.
"For instance, one of the great things that they do is they bring a fire prop that is an airplane, so it has gas emitted within it and you extinguish that fire prop, and they invite us to work with them," Klippenstein says. "So that is one opportunity that we get to do some of their work, so this will be an opportunity they can come and work more structural firefighting."
Klippenstein says the hope is the training facility will be coming very soon to St. Joseph.
INTERVIEW
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