Fire training center moves forward

PALMER — It might not look like much, just a few roads and some buried water lines.

But the Central Mat-Su Fire Department’s plans for the 73 acres it has near its station on Knik-Goose Bay Road include a training center with the potential to draw in firefighters from across Southcentral Alaska.

“We’ve already had the municipality of Anchorage and Chugiak use our fire training center,” said Mat-Su Borough Director of Emergency Services Dennis Brodigan. “All of the borough fire service areas have used it as well.”

Michael Keenan, deputy chief of Central Mat-Su, said the roads going in this year will open up the parcel to further development. The water lines will be connected to fire hydrants but those hydrants won’t be operational right away.

“The hydrants will go in this year, but the water supply is a couple years out,” Keenan said. To feed those hydrants, the department needs a water tank, probably somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 gallons in capacity. “Sears has donated their tank that they have in the back of their building right now, contingent on them getting city water. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

The department might end up having to build its own tank.

Also in the near term is a warehouse planned to go up in 2014. It’ll be built as kind of a hybrid storage facility/training facility. The storage side will hold equipment like turnout gear and hoses. The other side, Keenan said, will have a wide-open space tall enough to do ladder training and useful for training in the winter months.

“Outside would be set up like a commercial occupancy,” he said.

The idea there being that with the same type of roof and façade, the firefighters could practice getting on top of a commercial building and other training they need to fight that kind of fire.

Everything else planned for the site, Keenan said, doesn’t really have a timeline.

“It’s a funding-dependant type of timeline, so as we get the funding we’ll be able to get more facilities,” he said.

Eventually, the idea would be to have multiple training towers. There’s already a tower on the site. They start fires inside it with hay and wood pellets to simulate structure fires. The department wants to move that back farther onto the site and then add a few more to practice different types of structure fires.

There would also eventually be a spot to practice hazardous material response. There wouldn’t be any actual hazardous materials, just materials simulating them. Those fake hazardous materials could be used to leak through cracked tanks and other training mock-ups.

The department also wants to set up a driving course.

“What we do now is we have to go out to open parking lots and try to do that,” Keenan said. “Open parking lots in this area are few and far between nowadays.”

There are also plans for trenches and collapsed buildings to practice what firefighters call “technical rescue.”

The department also wants to put in a larger gravel pad to practice cutting up cars with their rescue tools. Another plan calls for an “airplane fuselage prop” to practice fighting plane crash fires.

All of this is planned for a relatively populated area that’s only getting more populous. Keenan and Brodigan said the borough is very cognizant of that. The plan calls for 100 feet of buffer trees around the perimeter of the property to cut down on noise and visual impacts. There’s a fence there already to keep people out, and the department cuts off all training at 10 p.m. to keep from disturbing neighbors.

Oh, and there are no plans to burn anything that creates hazards or copious amounts of smoke. The airplane prop, for instance, would be fed with propane or natural gas.

“I know that there have been concerns voiced in the past, but again, most everybody once they find out that their fears aren’t going to be realized they get onboard,” Brodigan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.