The Houston Fire Department spent millions of dollars this year to upgrade its fire-training facility, said Brian Kimberly, a training officer at the department. In fact, the training facility morphed from a garage-based facility available only to chief officers to a $2.6 million, 10,000-square-foot simulator warehouse that trains 4,000 local firefighters, as well as visiting firefighters.

The facility has two bays for training where two separate incidents can be run at once or individually. Simulations focus on large-scale, multiple-alarm interoperability drills run on a computer console with a simulation software program from Flame-Sim. The software coincides with a specific curriculum, Kimberly noted.

The software puts firefighters in the driver’s seat, said Tony Reed, a captain and training officer with the Houston Fire Department. Firefighters start at the firehouse, then drive the engine to the scene, receive instructions from dispatchers over radio and must react accordingly on the fireground.

“They start to mitigate any problems that come up,” Reed said. “And some of those problems are water supply, losing firefighters — we addressed those issues in the simulator and it’s been very successful.”

The software system is the core component to the training, Kimberly said.

“We were trying to find a tactical-level trainer, where we could get down to the nuts and bolts as far as entrances, entry points, attack modes …,” Kimberly said. “Then we focus on tactics. For example, in studying our line-of-duty deaths we found that they happen in the first 10 minutes, so we try to focus training to do that and evaluate our findings.”

The software can be customized as far as vehicles and scenarios, said Doug Seebach, Flame-Sim’s vice president. Structures can be adapted, fires lit in any room within the structure and accelerants tailored “so you don’t walk into the same place twice,” Seebach said.

“It comes with 150 scenarios we built for you but also you can build as many as you want,” he said.

Kimberly said simulator training is starting to influence policies and procedures at the department, including testing materials. The department recently changed its high-rise firefighting guidelines based on the simulation results.

Firefighters are not resistant to the training, as it was once reserved for chief officers only, Kimberly said.

“The biggest testimony to that is that we started in a converted garage and now we have funded and designed a 10,000-square-foot version,” Kimberly said. “It’s fun. Everything is painted black … we have stage lighting, a smoke machine, plus the simulator. Guys even come and run it on their days off, so I think they all like it.”

Reed said simulation training is beneficial and departments need to consider implementing it immediately. It translates quickly to field, he said.

“We are big advocates of the simulation training,” Reed said. “Firefighters get a lot out of it.”