Firefighter
Training at the Heritage Inn
The old motel at 809 East Dixie has volumes of
memories to share, if only its rooms could talk. The once-thriving business has
been abandoned, neglected, and vandalized. The rooms now shelter debris and
destruction, along with evidence that an occasional transient still takes the
inn at its original word.
The Heritage Inn is soon to be demolished, but in the interim the structure has
yet proved useful. On Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15, the motel was the site
of twelve hours of training for firefighters from Central Hardin, Elizabethtown,
and Rineyville Fire Departments.
Sunday’s
drills began at 8:30 a.m. with the arrival of Central Hardin units 1064, 1031,
and 1023 – a tanker and two engines – and Rineyville’s Engine 3.
“We practiced fast attack hose drills for an hour,” said State Fire/Rescue
Training Level II Instructor Everett Roberts, who is also an Elizabethtown and a
Central Hardin firefighter. “We worked on speed of deployment:
pulling up, pulling hose, and knocking down a target. We practiced timed drills
with different hose loads.” The attack line is the hose that carries water from
a fire engine, the attack engine, to the fire.
“Elizabethtown Fire Department arrived at ten o’clock with Ladder One and
presented an orientation of aerial apparatus operations,” said Roberts. “Then we
did a fire scenario of a structure fire on the second floor.” Firefighters
deployed hose lines, searched the rooms, and rescued a victim before the fire
escalated out of control and they were forced to evacuate. Firefighters then
battled the fire with the master stream off the aerial. A master stream device,
such as a deck gun, is capable of flooding a fire with more than three hundred
gallons of water per minute.
The afternoon culminated in another fire scenario. “We had a large fire in three
rooms,” said Roberts. “They had to do an initial attack, a search and rescue,
and then evacuate when the fire got out of control. They had to set up multiple
lines to protect the two-story exposure and also set up a dump tank.” When a
search crew became trapped in a room, the Rapid Intervention Team breached a
rear wall to rescue them. Firefighters on the roof used a K-12 saw to execute a
trench cut ventilation, a wide eave-to-eave opening that is made to slow or stop
a rapidly progressing fire.
The weekend’s simulations were performed without the use of fire. The Heritage
Inn sustained a few more holes in its roofs and walls and considerable water
damage to its already-mildewed rooms. Training sites like the motel are
invaluable for the lessons learned by firefighters who will carry new knowledge
and experience away from a scenario and apply it in the future when reality
comes to call.
photos by Steven and Angela Townsend
story by Angela Townsend
(Click photos to
enlarge)
