Lamar County Fire Coordinator Kyle Hill knows training continues to be important for the volunteer firefighters who snap to duty in the county’s 13 departments.
In talking with the Board of Supervisors last week about construction of a training facility, Hill pointed out the possible site behind the county Emergency Operations Center off the Industrial Road in Purvis.
“Right now, what we’re talking about doing is just building a burn training building,” Hill said.
The facility would allow trainees to do some rappelling work, rescue work, ladder work and other related activities.
“The fire side is really just a small part of it because the way we’ve got this facility envisioned, for instance, is the fact up here in the Hattiesburg area are so many three-story apartments,” he said. “A large part of what we do is a medical call; that’s the majority of our calls for all the departments in the county. So, one of the skills that they struggle with up here is we get somebody overweight and we have to visit the third-floor apartment and they can’t walk. They may be bedridden. We have to take them from one third-floor apartment with stairs. You go down about five or six steps and there’s a landing. You have to make a turn and go down five or six more steps.”
Firefighters have to practice different techniques, and there’s no place to simulate that, Hill said.
“There’s lots of other opportunities to do things,” he said. “Lamar County had a guy stuck on the cell phone tower a couple of months ago down in Baxterville. We’ve got rope rescue guys in the county on the team, but where do you practice that skill? There’s not a controlled environment to be able to go out and practice that.”
For controlled firefighting work, Hill said the training facility will have enhancements that will allow trainees to use techniques for dealing with fires and for breaching structures. For example, it will have doors and roof openings designed to be breached multiple times.
“Then there’s two or three rooms that we will design as actual live fire rooms that would be able to have a fire in it. So, when we train we don’t have to simulate.”
Controlled situations may not follow natural conditions, Hill noted.
“You just try to do the best you can to simulate the real thing as close as you can to it in controlled conditions,” he said. “These things are not going to have the potential of a roof collapse or fire over your head or things like you would encounter in a real structure.”
Hill said the new training facility is not going to compete or replace the Mississippi Fire Academy.
“There’s a few things they allowed us to do, like teach the classroom skills and stuff in the field,” he said. “But when it comes to testing, most of the classes have to be tested at the fire academy. So, this won’t replace that; we’ll still have to go up there to do those things. It’s not in any form or fashion trying to compete or take the Fire Academy out of what we have to do from the certification process. What it is doing is allowing us to get into some more training like they all practice on a monthly basis.”
Hill said getting the facility together means getting all the pieces of the puzzle together. “We will start seeking funding, and we’re going to have to publicly take that funding as far as we can, applying for grants or whatever options are out,” he said.
“We’re not putting a lot of technology in it, and that’s where your cost would arise,” he continued. “Over the course of 25 years or so, we’ll put in technology so you can build some of these gas-powered fires that you can turn on and off.”