On Tuesday afternoon, La Porte Hospital provided the La Porte City Fire Department with a unique training opportunity on a number of vacant homes on hospital property.
As the hospital prepares to break ground on their new hospital in August, they’ve begun preparing the land for the event. This preparation means taking down some vacant structures owned by the hospital, which provided a valuable opportunity for the local fire department to hone its skills. By allowing them to stage residential fire training on the buildings before they are removed, La Porte Hospital granted the department a thorough training occasion.
“We are preparing as much of our property as we can for the staging and building of the new La Porte Hospital, and in that process, with a great suggestion from Pavey Excavating of La Porte, we reached out to the La Porte City Fire Department to see if they could use these structures for training first,” said Stacey Kellogg, Regional Manager of Community Relations for La Porte Hospital. “We’ve been told they don’t get a lot of opportunities to train on residential homes so, it’s pretty fascinating to see them here today doing the work that they do. We’re happy to be able to provide that opportunity.”
As the training got underway, it was apparent how valuable it was to the firefighters on site. Through the use of smoke machines, mannequins, and directions from the training chief, firefighters were able to sharpen their skills, discuss communication, and experience unfamiliar territory during training.
“This is great, we have the opportunity to work in residential homes with layouts that we’re not used to, and that’s about as real as it can get. Most of where we go, we haven’t been in before, so we’re feeling our way through blind,” said Assistant Chief, A.C. Pressler.
For Training Chief Zach Kanney, the ability to train his team away from the department, and on unfamiliar structures, is incredible.
“We were given these houses to train in, that’s a huge benefit for us to sharpen our skills, which are perishable,” Kanney said. “We’ll be going through search and rescue, fire extinguishing, ventilation, and various skills throughout the day. We’ll throw in a couple of things to surprise them because it’s very important for us to sharpen our skills. Hopefully it’ll be a great day for everyone to see what’s going on, and how we try to better ourselves.”
A well-trained fire department is a positive for any city. La Porte’s department has found many ways to train, but being given vacant houses to create new scenarios is valuable.
“The hospital has been fantastic about this,” Kanney said. “We couldn’t have done this without them. I always wish for vacant houses for us to train in, I’d like us to be the best department we possibly can, that’s my goal.”
