What are the most important aspects of fire training buildings? For an expert opinion, Fire Chief posed that question to the Illinois Fire Service Institute in downstate Champaign. The IFSI is the statutory fire academy for the State of Illinois and is operated as a continuing education and public service activity by the University of Illinois.

Although IFSI's Deputy Director David Clark is quick to acknowledge that any number of variables enter the training facility equation, from cost of maintenance to environmental impact, he says that the final test is safety. “The best training structures, though,” Clark says, “are those that enable rigorous, realistic training. Realism is critical.” Any potential factors of compromise with respect to realism, from budget considerations to scheduling, should be evaluated against that goal, he counsels.

While realism may be the goal, virtually any training structures will involve some trade-offs because they must exist in the real world. So how should priorities be set? Defining a structure's purpose, says Clark, is the first step.

To burn or not to burn

“First, there's the concept of the all-purpose facility — one where you'll be doing live-fire training, rope-rescue training, ladder work, and so forth,” he says. “But even a small amount of smoke and fire in a building, in the minds of some vertical and rope-rescue people, can make it unsuitable for rope use. They don't want to run the risk of any contaminants damaging the ropes. So one of the first decisions to be made is whether a building is going to be strictly a fire burn facility or if it going to be multi-use structure.

If a building is going to be used for live-fire training and for other purposes — rope-rescue training, as an example — you need to think through just what you can do to minimize the contamination of the rope from the products of combustion. If the rope work is going to be limited strictly to the outside of a building, rappelling from the top of a tower for instance, the soot, debris and contaminants that are on the inside of the building may not be a factor. But if there is going to be rope work as well as fire work done inside the structure, some people are going to have some concerns about contamination of the rope.”

The burn/no-burn distinction has been a conscious decision made by IFSI. For decades, it made use of a 6-story concrete-and-block training tower for all manner of training evolutions, supplemented more recently by a 1-story residential-style burn building and a 2-story commercial-space burn building. “We did our rope work off the top of the tower, on the outside, and just had to try to stagger our classes so we didn't have a fire class and a rope class going at the same time,” Clark explains.

In the 1990s, however, IFSI began experimenting with the use of intermodal shipping containers to stage non-burn training. A three-container structure built as a smoke house to facilitate mask work, search exercises and so forth served as a prototype for what is now the centerpiece for IFSI's non-burn training evolutions: a 4-story structure completed in 2003 made of 13 cargo containers and accommodating the majority of the IFSI vertical and confined-space rescue training. (A separate urban search and rescue area is sited nearby.) And when IFSI says it's a non-burn structure, it means it. Nothing that might contaminate surfaces and transfer to ropes is allowed in the structure. The use of burn barrels and agents like pepper fog are prohibited, as well.

Even though burns aren't allowed, however, and even though the structure was specifically designed to meet all the NFPA standards for vertical rescue training, much more than just rope work is accommodated by the structure. “We conduct many of our firefighting-type evolutions in there,” says Clark, “just without smoke and fire. We run command and control operations, train for hose line advancement, laddering, firefighter rescue, and so forth.”

Forethought and planning were in no small part responsible for the utility of the structure. “We spent six to nine months playing around with different designs,” Clark explains. “We spent hours stacking four-by-four wood cribbing blocks to model it, trying to come up with an arrangement that would maximize its capabilities, both as a vertical prop and for other types of training, like the routines we'd been running with the smoke house. The design kept expanding and evolved over time. We now can simulate everything from elevator shafts to industrial spaces.”

IFSI also relied on the input of its training instructors. “We used the expertise of our instructors to come up with the most effective design. They told us what they needed the thing to do, what capabilities they needed in it,” Clark says.

Once the concept was firmed up, the engineers entered the picture. Clark says the assembly specifically was designed to be totally stable, with no stresses to be put on the containers themselves. “We didn't want any torque or twist being put on the containers if someone went over the side with a rope tied off to the ceiling or wall of a can,” he says. “So the design incorporates an 8-inch steel box beam throughout the structure to which everything anchors and to which all tie-offs are made. There's nothing that puts a stress on the containers' walls or even on their frames.”

Another design consideration was the number of individuals to be trained. Unlike a facility used by a single fire department for training one or two companies of firefighters at a time, where one or two rappelling stations might be adequate, the IFSI structure accommodates class sizes of 30 or more individuals and multiple simultaneous evolutions. Multiple exercise stations helps minimize trainee “stand-around” time.

Incorporating cargo containers as the main elements of the structure helps out from the standpoint of the IFSI maintenance budget, too. “We look at them as disposable props,” says Clark. “The cost is $2,000 to $2,500 per container. You bring them in, they wear out, you throw them away and get new ones.…

“If you've designed a cargo container structure well and take care of it, there isn't a whole lot of maintenance to perform. We have ours inspected every year by structural engineers to make sure they're sound, and all of our instructors and staff are always on the lookout for anything that may be a safety hazard, be it a door that is jamming or a window that is binding. And we went over the whole thing after it was built with grinders to round off and smooth off any point that conceivably might pose a hazard to a rope or a person.

“We spend anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 annually on the maintenance of our masonry burn buildings, just replacing blocks and ironwork and things that get damaged just from use, although we've learned how to reduce the damage to the buildings by decreasing somewhat the size of our fires, and compensating for that by reducing the hose lines down to J-inch garden hose straight tips. This forces the students to pay more attention to the fire and proper stream application. If things turn bad, they can remove the small tip and they have a I-inch hole in the reducer that provides a good stream for safety. The cargo containers, however, are quite cost effective. Throwing away a $2,500 can every four to six years is a lot cheaper than maintaining a more expensive building.”

In addition, training structures made of cargo containers can be made to be modular, reconfigured and even moved. While IFSI has no plans for doing so with its Champaign structure, it did dismantle a structure at a regional training center and move it 25 miles to another site a few years ago. “We just took them apart, put them on trucks and hauled them from one town to another,” says Clark. “You can do that relatively easily.”

Burn buildings

The IFSI's 6-story tower has evolved over the 40-plus years since it was first built. Initially, only the first and second floors were enclosed — the ground floor held an apparatus bay and classroom, and the second floor was a burn room. Floors three through six of the poured-concrete structure had no walls, just railings around the edges of each level. A 4-foot opening in the center of the floors of each of the upper levels accommodated inserts for training scenarios and allowed a shaft to be opened to the top. Eventually, however, block walls were added and the floor openings filled to allow for better control of smoke.

“Even from the start, all the floors were used for burns,” says Clark. “But before the tower was enclosed you basically just had a bonfire on each of the upper levels — nothing that contained heat and the smoke. By adding the walls, we were able to get a more realistic high-rise simulation. And it gave us more interior burn rooms.

“The basic construction is poured concrete. The columns, beams, floors and ceilings are covered with three inches of spray-on refractory concrete over wire mesh to protect them. The walls themselves are just concrete block and are expendable. Every few years you can just knock them out and replace them. We've found solid block lasts longer than hollow.”

In addition to the tower, a 1-story residential-style burn building and a 2-story commercial-space burn building are used for live-fire training. These buildings, too, are concrete-and-block construction and are protected by spray-on refractory cement. “We've tried various other products to protect the heavy burn areas over the years,” says Clark. “But a lot of maintenance was involved, and some of the sheet products were torn up by hose streams. We eventually settled on the spray-on refractory cement, and that's worked pretty well for us over the years.”

IFSI burns pallets and straw during its live-fire training, not propane. Again, Clark cites the priority of realism. “And we burn a lot,” he says. “Some places just fill up a shopping cart with excelsior and burn it for their live-fire training. We do more than that just starting a burn. It has to be realistic enough to be useful training. Of course, some common sense and experience has to come into it. We've be doing this for 80 years — and in a big way since the 1950s — so we've got a pretty good perspective on what is doable and what isn't, and how to do things safely.

“Safety is the bottom line with all the training classes we run, be it live-fire training or rope training or the use of tools or whatever. But for training to be useful, it needs to be as realistic as you can safely make it. And we realize that when you're using real ladders and real saws and real hoses and real rope, somebody is going to get hurt once in a while. So we try to do everything we can to minimize the chance of that happening and to minimize the severity if and when it does. Every one of our people has the issue of safety hammered into him time and time again, but we don't let ourselves get paranoid about it.”

As with the non-fire structure, IFSI class size probably comes into play as a greater dynamic than it would for an individual fire department. “Depending on the evolution, we run 24 to 32 people in the burn classes and our facilities suit that number well,” Clark says. But would he change anything if starting from scratch? “Frankly, the residential building is a little small, making the rooms inside it a little tight. Over the years we've made some modifications to the interior walls to try to give us larger rooms, but if we were doing it over again, we'd make it half-again as big as what it is. And the building simulating commercial space wouldn't need to be quite as tall as what it is. And as long as I'm doing things over, I'd only go five stories on the tower; I wouldn't go six.”

Room to move

A final consideration that Clark notes should be kept in mind regarding training facilities is an eye to the future. “Things change,” he says simply. “Fire departments take on new missions, so generally that means they'll need more room and different facilities on which to train. Fifteen years ago, there wasn't that much of an emphasis on rope work. Now, more and more departments are getting into vertical rescue. They're getting into hazardous material response. Their training facilities need to evolve to accommodate training for those areas. Who knows what it is going to be 20 years from now, but chances are it will require more training.

“When an agency or a community is thinking of a site, ideally they should get enough ground to allow operations to expand a little bit. If nothing else, there may be an opportunity to acquire a training prop if they have a place to put it. Maybe a business would be willing to donate a grain bin or a loading rack or who knows what, if they just have a space somewhere to put it.

“Twenty years ago, the petrochemical industry in Illinois was offering to give us cracking towers and loading racks and docks and tanks and a variety of good props, but we didn't have anywhere to put them, so we weren't able to take them. The name of the game is to be ready to take advantage of opportunities.

“The training buildings we have today here in Champaign allow us to run the size, number and type of classes we do, with the biggest problem being running multiple classes simultaneously. We do it fairly frequently, but we have to do some juggling of the schedule. One class gets the commercial building in the morning and the tower in the afternoon, for example. It's a little difficult to do multiple burn classes at the same time, but we do it, although we push the limit at our annual fire college when we have several hundred people here.”

With current capacity in mind, then, what does Clark see for IFSI's future? “We have plans to expand what we do, and would like to double or triple our capability for structural burns. We want to get a couple sets of the types of burn buildings we have now, and we'd like to have a row of storefronts to train with. We also want to set up a rural training scenario with a farmhouse and a barn and some outbuildings and such to run exposure evolutions and so forth.

“Ideally, we'd like to have about three times as much burn capability as what we have here now. So we're looking to move our burn operations to some acreage the university has a few miles from here. We'll still do the rescue and hazmat training here and keep our administrative offices here, but we want eventually to move the burn facility out in the country a ways, and get it surrounded by a mile or so of university-owned farm land.”