An unexpected training opportunity

The Moorcroft Volunteer Fire Department was recently given the opportunity to train for interior rescue scenarios, using an abandoned house north of town. According to Moorcroft Volunteer Fire Chief Jeff Holberg, "The property is in the Henderson Subdivision and is going to be torn down. The new owner was gracious enough to allow us to go in and practice."

Because the two departments work so often together on the same scenes, Moorcroft invited Pine Haven to participate in this exercise. Pine Haven's fire chief TJ Gideon later expressed his appreciation, "It was really excellent training so thank Moorcroft for inviting us on that."

Holberg explained the lesson firefighters learned in this exercise, "We used our sweet smoke system to fill the house... It worked marvelously. It replicated real life fire and everyone commented you couldn't see six inches in front of your face so excellent training to go in and do a search of the structure; no one was familiar with it so everything was learned that day about how to do a search when it's blinding smoke."

The crews also practiced a water shovel scenario, setting up a portable tank filled with water along with several pump trucks to "shovel" water from the tank to the site, "That's a very real circumstance that all of the outskirts of Moorcroft will have to do," Holberg stated, "suppress a fire, shovel water, work from a porta tank and pump water."

He was pleased to have shared this opportune training experience with their fellow volunteers, "It was exciting to work with Pine Haven. I believe they were represented by eight people and Moorcroft's department had 14 people at the training and everyone commented on how well it went, it was an excellent exercise. We all learned how to work better together and we learned that if we have a mistake, it's better if we have that in a training so it becomes easier on a real scene."