As well as plans for a new fire engine purchase, Grand Forks Fire Rescue are currently developing new training grounds that will provide the volunteer firefighters a place to train and practice drills near the airport.
After five years of discussions and planning, the training grounds are finally underway.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time and investigating funding and everything else in regards to it, including finding a piece of property that is adequate for it,” Grand Forks Fire Rescue Chief Dale Heriot noted. “Now we finally have a piece of property so the guys can go ahead and raise some funds to build up equipment.”
Heriot added that the land in use belongs to the City of Grand Forks, but Grand Forks Fire Rescue has a licence of occupation agreement with the city. The property is still owned by the city, but the firefighters will be able to train on the grounds.
The training grounds will include a burn building facility, a car fire prop, some angle rescue props, propane tank breach props, and a natural gas leak prop.
Heriot added that most of that stuff would be either natural gas or propane.
“There should be very little smoke from the training grounds,” he said. “The only possibility of smoke may be when we do our fires in the burn building because we need to use Class A materials for that, which is ordinary wood.”
The training ground is an on-going project, though Heriot hopes that 50 per cent of the props will be in place by the end of the year to be able to be used for practices
“The development of the training ground will be on-going as we raise funds to develop and train it,” he said.
The fire department recently had a car wash and hot dog sale to raise funds for new equipment.
“One of the biggest reasons for the training ground is that the community expects us to protect them and we need to practice in a facility so that we can protect them,” Heriot said.
“The other part to that, and especially in regards to live fire burning and doing interior fire attack in event of having a fire in a residence or business, it’s getting increasingly more difficult to find buildings that we can work in and burn, due to environmental concerns.”
Heriot pointed out that the grounds are a really good way for the volunteer firefighters to get the training and to feel the heat of live fire, while still having it environmentally safe and safe for them.
Once the training grounds are up and running, volunteers will be using the space most weeks to train and practice.
“We do train all over the valley here and there’s some kinds of training that won’t be at the training grounds, but a lot of it will be at the training grounds,” Heriot concluded.