Special to The Detroit News Firefighter recruits learn their jobs without the benefits of equipment they would use at a fire. The first time they get to fight an actual fire is on their first real-life run.

Training

Recruits learn through make-believe

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

    Trainees at the Detroit Fire Department academy raise ladders, tie knots and hook pumper trucks to hydrants. But there is one thing they don’t do.
    Put out fires.
    The academy doesn’t have a facility for instructors to set fires and let trainees put them out. For years, the department set the city’s abandoned houses afire for training, but stopped after the practice was deemed too dangerous by a national firefighter’s association in 1986.
    Now trainees and their instructors play a game of make believe. Dressed in full firefighting gear, trainees are taken to abandoned buildings where they go through the motions of putting out imaginary fires.
    They hook pumper trucks to hydrants and turn on hoses, but the have to wait until after graduation to get their first taste of battling a real fire.
    Experts say they are missing a lot. “There is no better training for a firefighter than the experience of putting out a real fire,“ said Jim Porcello, regional supervisor of the Michigan Firefighters Training Council. “Learning to put out fires is what firefighting is all about.”
    This is just one in a series of strikes against the academy that has trained Detroit firefighters for 74 years. Housed in a decaying building with little in the way of equipment or tools, the facility fails to provide recruits the experience they need.
    Trainees can’t practice with many of the essential fire fighting equipment and tools because the academy doesn’t have them.
    The academy doesn’t have tools for ripping off window bars, chain saws, gas torches, exhaust fans, kits for disabling air bags, seat belt cutters, and other tools firefighters use daily, according to Fire Department records.
    Instead, trainees get classroom lessons on fire fighting and go through physical fitness exercises.
    If instructors want to demonstrate the use of these tools the department has to close a fire company and borrow its equipment. But for many recruits, the first time they will get to use these tools is during real emergencies when lives are at stake.
    And trainees are not taught how to use ropes to escape burning buildings. The academy’s stock of ropes can only be used for knot-tying practice. According to department records, they are unsafe for anything else.
    The academy is also missing some big ticket items:
* It doesn’t have a working pumper or ladder truck. When recruits are trained on these trucks the department has to close fire companies and take their vehicles.
* The facility designed to provide firefighters with the invaluable experience of working in heavy smoke, broke down years ago and remains unusable. The academy doesn’t even have a machine to create the smoke.
    The Detroit News found that the academy’s instructors have pleaded with the department’s brass to improve conditions for more than two years.
    In March 1998, instructor Thomas Walker wrote to then-Deputy Commissioner Gregory Love listing more than 31 things the academy didn’t have or needed to have fixed. Since then fire officials have taken care of fewer than five items on the list.
    The academy has also come under fire on other fronts.
    More than half the city’s 1,200 firefighters have lost certification to handle low-level hazardous materials emergencies because the academy and Fire Department failed to provide the annual training required by the state.
    The need for this training was driven home in the department’s handling of a hazardous materials incident at the Wayne County Community College chemistry lab on Oct. 23, 1997. Firefighters were sent to the college following a complaint of a dangerous chemical in the lab that left an employee unconscious.
    The chemical was bromine, a dark reddish, fuming substance mainly used in gasoline antiknock additives and dyes. Made from natural brine and seawater, the chemical was toxic.
    The firefighters had all received basic hazardous materials training at the Fire Department’s academy, but lost their certification because they received no refresher courses. Their lack of training showed.
    Firefighters entered the building without protective clothing and removed the bromine. But rather than place the chemical in a safe place and wait until it was picked up by one of the companies that handle hazardous cleanups for the city, they placed the bromine in a dumpster and left.
    The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) cited the Fire Department for four violations, including the failure to provide follow-up hazardous materials training to firefighters, in connection with the incident on Feb. 24, 1998. The department was fined $2,650, which it paid.
    But the department was again fined after a follow-up inspection by MIOSHA revealed it still wasn’t following proper hazardous materials procedure. On March 10, fire officials paid a $4,000 MIOSHA fine.

Contact the reporters at churt@detnews.com and mclaxton@detnews.com.