GREENFIELD — Greenfield Fire Department hosted a live fire training on April 24, the last in a series of trainings held on a property located on the northern end of town.
Firefighters from Greenfield, Salinas, King City, Monterey, Gonzales and Pine Canyon collaborated on exercises to practice skills in a vacant residential structure.
“When we go into a real house fire, every second counts and every second we lose is that much more property that’s damaged,” said Jim Langborg, Greenfield’s fire chief. “We don’t take the time to see how the fire’s behaving, we just take care of the fire.”
Firefighters used the last of the property’s four structures to practice climbing, venting, rescuing and entering the burning structure.
At the end of the Saturday practice, they let the small burns grow into a blaze that consumed the building, not only to provide observations of how fire behaves, but also to demolish the structure.
The practice area came about when the property owner partnered with the City of Greenfield to get rid of abandoned buildings. Four buildings, three of them houses, were located on the property. Greenfield Fire Department used those buildings in multiple practice sessions.
According to Langborg, the benefit to the commercial property owner is the clearance of abandoned residential buildings, while the city benefits with emergency training and the removal of otherwise potential blight.
The structures first had to be cleared of asbestos and lead, before they were ready for training purposes.
Although Greenfield Fire Department recently installed a fire training area with cargo containers at the city maintenance yard, Langborg said actual buildings are much more valuable for fire training. Fires behave differently in a building with many more corners and where almost every component is flammable.
“Fires don’t typically happen in newer, well-maintained houses,” he said. “Most of the time they’re in older houses. They have a lot of additions and strange interior configurations.”
Due to the training value, Langborg said Greenfield reached out to the other fire departments to gain from the opportunity.
He added that the city is working with property owners to not only meet the needs of the city, but also help the needs of the property owners, and welcomed any who would like to find such ways to be mutually beneficial.
