By Ben Aguirre Jr.
Inside Bay Area (California)
Copyright 2007 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
All Rights Reserved
FREMONT, Calif. — As thick smoke filled the darkened seventh-floor hallway of the Fremont Marriott hotel, firefighters had no time to panic. They had to remain calm because they had a job to do -- stay safe, save lives and extinguish the fire.
Those were some of the lessons that fire instructors were teaching Bay Area crews Thursday during a training exercise held at the south Fremont hotel.
More than 150 firefighters from three counties attended the all-day exercise in fighting high-rise fires, and about the same number are expected to participate today when the drill is expected to resume.
For the first time in a dozen years, local agencies came together for hands-on training in search-and-rescue tactics, and a series of lecture-style sessions and demonstrations in managing equipment and personnel during a large event.
“We usually try to do this every five years, but the focus of our training has shifted (to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism-related incidents) since 2001,” said Geoff LaTendresse, a Fremont fire operations division chief who helped coordinate the event.
Although high-rise fires are rare in the Bay Area, and there are only a few such buildings in the Tri-City area, incidents of this magnitude often require a large amount of resources, LaTendresse said.
Instructors from different departments rotated crews through five stations, including a demonstration on using large-capacity hoses and a lifelike search-and-rescue drill.
At the onset of the session, the teams met on the sixth floor of the Marriott and instructors spoke about tactics that should be used during a high-rise fire. They stressed the importance of using a 200-foot rope as a lifeline and guide to move in and out of a smoky hallway. They also preached the importance of controlled breathing.
“Focus on air management,” Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Capt. Jason Solak said, talking about the air bottles that firefighters carry on their backs. “We’re losing a lot of firefighters to asphyxia.”
After the brief lecture, the crews put their breathing apparatuses on, staged in the hotel’s stairwell and then made their way through the dark hallway.
If they were lucky enough, they got to use an expensive thermal imaging camera, or TIC, to aid in their search. Some fire departments do not have thermal cameras, which cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000, but the Fremont Fire Department has two of them, Capt. Gerry Fogel said.
If the crew did not have the device — which detects the difference in temperature and displays an image on a miniature hand-held screen — they had to rely on old-fashioned tactics of crawling, touching a wall and feeling for a victim.
“It’s time-consuming and cumbersome,” Fogel said.
Fremont fire Capt. Rick Cory, one of the organizers of the event, called the search-and-rescue exercise a “very scary, realistic scenario.”
“There’s no substitute for hands-on experience,” he said.
In addition, Cory said the event was beneficial for all agencies involved because it gave them a chance to interact, share strategies and see what equipment other departments are using.
“It let everyone play with the different tools and see the different procedures,” Cory said. “And hopefully we can take this and generate some sort of standard procedure.”