Fire Department building new training tower

A new project is going to take the Homewood Fire Department’s training up several levels — literally — come November, said Fire Chief John Bresnan.

The department is constructing a new training tower from used shipping containers on the back corner of the property at Fire Station #3 off West Oxmoor Road. Once completed, the tower will offer firefighters the chance to get experience in multi-floor and high-angle rescues, as well as do structural collapse drills and other types of training, Bresnan said.

“For firefighters, the training is not just ‘Can we put water on the fire?’ anymore. Our mission has expanded such that when disaster hits, we are the first line of the offense of trying to put things back together,” he said.

And a high-angle rescue can include not just rescuing someone from an upper floor of a building but also from a steep embankment off of the interstate.

Battalion Chief Mike Anastasia said much of firefighting occurs in stairwells, and Homewood has more hotel occupancy than anywhere else in Alabama.

“Hotels are all the way down State Farm Parkway; they’re at Oxmoor, and they’re all fairly sophisticated and four, five and six stories,” he said. “The tower will be good because it emulates three flights of stairs.”

Six 20-foot shipping containers will make up the structure. One will sit next to a stack of two, with a stack of three beside that one, and all will be bolted together to a concrete foundation. Doors and windows will be cut and staircases constructed to make a mock one- two- and three-story building, and movable walls will be placed inside.

“Building a full concrete structure for training would cost a half million to a million plus,” Anastasia said. The container structure will cost less than $100,000.

And it’s portable, he said. If the fire station is ever relocated, the containers can be unbolted and put back together on a new concrete foundation.

Up until now, Homewood firefighters have had to train in a local parking garage or on makeshift structures built in station truck bays, or on a burnable house brought in on a trailer, Bresnan said.

They have made do with that setup, but scheduling and coordinating training in a parking garage with a local business is complicated, he said.

Structures in station bays can only be so large and stay set up for a little while. And the burnable house has to be contracted and is only one story — a size that can be transported on a trailer, Bresnan said.

It works, but it’s not ideal, he said.

The new structure would provide ongoing training for firefighters and “give them the confidence in themselves and their equipment that’s so important,” Bresnan said.

For instance, he said there are rope operations that are “very technical in nature” used for high-angle rescues.

“This provides the environment to do that in a relatively safe environment,” Bresnan said.

Once completed, the structure will be painted to blend in with the station and the surrounding industrial area, he said. Trees also will be planted to provide a natural barrier between the tower and the road.

Bresnan said he hopes the structure will be completed by November.