Behind The Scenes: The Department of Emergency Services' Fire Training Center
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Firefighters need to be prepared for any situation, be it operating in total darkness and extreme heat of a house fire or rescuing someone who’s fallen into an icy lake. There’s the physical aspect of it, of course: operating with 70+ pounds of equipment on your back; making the most of an almost-empty air tank; breaching a bolted door. But there’s also the mental aspect: operating pumps to keep water flowing through hoses (a mathematically complicated task); the mechanics involved in using different equipment and tools; understanding chemistry and architecture to know how a fire will behave, and how a building will react as a result.
To master all of these intricacies, newly minted firefighters in Westchester undergo a 16-week Career Academy at the Department of Emergency Services’ Fire Training Center. The training center, situated on the Grasslands Campus of Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, is the second-busiest training facility in New York, preparing the county’s 58 departments (five of which are career-only, 14 combination, and 39 all-volunteer), along with fire brigades from organizations like Metro-North and IBM, EMS, and other emergency response teams over a combined 125,000 hours. The campus has everything the trainees need: A six-story high-rise building; a single-family house; a smokehouse (pumped full of “Hollywood” smoke); a building with ever-changing mazes where trainees learn to navigate in complete darkness; a hydraulic roof simulator; a ConEd manhole; and a few cars and propane tanks.
We wanted to get a firsthand look at the training center, and luckily 19 trainees from six different departments allowed us to tag along for a day.
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- The six-story high-rise allows trainees to practice propelling down the side of the building, which they do over this cargo net in case anything goes wrong. They’ll also learn how to ascend the building on ladders from the engines.
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- Before the recession, people would donate old cars to the training center. Since they’re now junking them for the money instead, the training center has this custom-built car they set on fire (with hay in the backseat). The rusted parts in the picture are also where they practice cutting and sawing to help release people trapped inside.
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- Trainees are thrown (not literally, of course) into the fire pretty early on. During their first days of training, they’re shown how to effectively handle real fires. Aside from learning how to best approach certain fires, they’ll learn how to effectively use the hose to extinguish the flames.
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- The hydraulic roof structure allows trainees to practice how to operate on different pitches. The roof can be put on a steep incline, so trainees can practice cutting through the roof at various angles. Different amounts of smoke can be pumped through various vents, so firefighters never know what to expect while sawing through the roof.
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- A birds’-eye view from the high-rise shows the trainees about to enter the single-family house, with smoke billowing out (they always burn non-toxic material that’s safe to breathe) from the fire inside. The ladder truck on the left was donated to the training center by New Rochelle, and the one on the right is on a six-week loan from White Plains.
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- The street-level view of the six-story high-rise, which is mostly used to practice running hoses up several flights.
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- ConEd donated this out-of-service manhole to the training center, where they use it to practice closed-space rescues.
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- The Fallen Firefighters Monument stands at the entrance of the training center. Bricks engraved with the names of each Westchester County firefighter killed in the line of duty adorn the wall behind this statue. The county has a ceremony at this monument every year to honor the men and women lost in the line of duty.
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- During their weeks of training, firefighters will cross-train to learn every facet of the job—from how to operate the pumps, to breaching the doors, to setting up and climbing ladders to enter a structure.
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- An aerial view of the training center shows the high-rise building, the single-family home (center of the photo), and the smokehouse (bottom left). The small pond seen in the middle is all the recycled runoff water, which is all reused during training.
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- This door structure is used to practice forcible entry. The pieces of wood on the inside simulate deadbolts. Using “the irons” (a flathead ax and a halogen tool), this crew must force the door open before the crew situated in front of the house (seen in photo 2) can enter the building.
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- This room inside the high-rise is where they set controlled fires (burning hay and wooden crates). The bricks are fireproof and made to contain fires inside the small area.
