frito1
Well-known member
...............but it was all in good fun.
Just a prop at our training area: https://www.futurefuelcorporation.com/Thought for a minute you were at this site: https://www.wsp.wa.gov/fire/fireacad.htm
Firemen have all the fun. they can play ith matches and no one yells at them
We don't use them for exterior flammable liquids training. I'll be honest I did question that myself 13 years ago when I came to work here from a municipal department. For non-training live fires we use whatever is appropriate. Since working here I've trained at Texas A&M and LSU, neither place used SCBA's for exterior stuff. The volume of black smoke is due to our current choice of fuel. We're burning Xylene, it's a little slow to light, but makes a hot fire. The down side is that it smokes like hell and goes out too easy. Our preferred fuel is Heptane. It lights easily, burns hot, and is hard to put out. It makes a more interesting and less smokey day of training. The problem is that we don't use it in processes any more and were having to special order 250 gallon totes for training. It got cost prohibitive. Xylene is available from operations whenever we need it and costs a lot less since it's bought by a rail car loads. We'll use 400-500 gallons in a day depending on the aggression of the guys training. We'll also use a couple of hundred gallons of LPG per day. We train four Fridays in a a row for our ERT and once a year (this Saturday) we invite any local FD member to come out and play. We provide the props, fuel, coaching, and lunch. It's fun to see new guy's eyes light up when they see our fires for the first time.No scbas???
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