ShawneeDispatch.com

Three firefighters rushed into the house, heaving a hose toward the back of the home in search of the flames.

It was a three-man effort, with a fourth firefighter feeding the loaded hose from outside. At the command of Capt. Ray Pettigrew, the firefighters drop to their knees, crawling through the back room to the basement stairs while lugging the hose.

Once they make it down the stairs to the basement, the source of the smoke, Pettigrew's voice can be heard through his oxygen mask: "OK, open her up!"

But though the water did flow, it was only for a few seconds. There was no fire; the smoke that filled the basement came from a smoke machine. The training effort Saturday, in a home on the corner of 57th Terrace and Barton scheduled for demolition Tuesday, was a chance for the Shawnee Fire Department to give its firefighters some on-site training.

Firefighters used the home, donated by Lino's Holding LLC, which plans a retail and condo development on the land, to train over the weekend in a way that regular drills can't quite match up to.

"As much as we try to train on this, it's always nice to have a real house," Pettigrew said.

The drill firefighters were doing Saturday is called a hose evolution: training to get a "loaded" hose, full of water but capped, through a smoke-filled home to a fire.

"That becomes really difficult as we're breathing the air, trying to talk and dealing with the heat coming at us," Pettigrew said. "... It's real easy when you can see what your doing and it's not hot."

Firefighters also used the home to run drills to find trapped or injured firefighters in the basement, so filled with smoke that nothing could be seen. Firefighters were sent in blindly, having to crawl the entire basement to look for the person, a dummy, by feel. They also took the opportunity to use the thermal imaging camera, which detects heat through the smoke.

Using homes that are about to be demolished is one of the best training possibilities for firefighters. Though at one time, fire departments were able to actually burn such homes, liability concerns prevent them from doing so any more, so there are few opportunities for firefighters to train facing real flames.

Which is why Shawnee had hoped to build a police and fire training tower at the site of the new Justice Center, a facility were controlled burns could take place. However, when the new Police Department, Municipal Court and Fire Station No. 2 were estimated to cost much more than originally expected with escalating construction costs, the training tower was one of the first things eliminated from the plan.

The site plans for the Justice Center complex submitted by Hoefer-Wysocki Architects do show a spot for the training tower on the site, but the tower, estimated at about $350,000 with current construction costs, will have to wait.

"It's just something we've got master-planned for the site in case we get the opportunity to build it," said Bert Schnettgoecke, city senior project engineer.

Until then, the firefighters will rely on regular training for experience, with the occasional structure donated for a few days of training with imaginary fire.

On Saturday, though the flames were imaginary, firefighters went through the motions as if the heat were real. Though they can see exactly where they need to go -- the smoke machine had only produced enough smoke to fill the basement -- they follow the hose along the floor to the stairs, just as they would if the smoke obstructed their sight and the heat pushed them to the ground. It's experience they'll fall back on when they face a real fire.

"If you're in an emergency, you kind of fall back on that practice because it's what's become natural," Pettigrew said.

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