FREDERICKTOWN — Anyone who drove Ohio 13 near Fredericktown the afternoon of Sept. 27 might have seen a big plume of black smoke just off the road.
While not a real emergency, it was a simulated one as the Fredericktown Community Fire District lit up an abandoned house on Pinkley Road to use for training.
“About six to eight months ago, we had a house to burn [for training] and did the same thing,” FCFD Chief Scott Mast said.
“Before that, it’s probably been a couple of years since we had a house to burn in. So, when you get one, you take full advantage.”
Mast said that Kokosing Construction owns the property and allowed FCFD to conduct its training at the site, and nearly 300 hours of combined training time inside before the burn.
Before the blaze, Mast did mention that FCFD obtained a burn permit from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
More than just one fire
Despite training fires being the biggest or most important training event FCFD does, Mast noted that his crew works to stay sharp.
“We train two evenings a month, that’s our regular scheduled trainings,” Mast said. “For the last two months, we’ve been going out there for those trainings.
“Some of the items we covered were fire-hose advancement, search and rescue, fire behavior and then fire extinguishment there on that last day.”
During the training, Mast looked at how his personnel worked together and who had what strengths and weaknesses.
“It’s nice to get all that figured out with your own personnel, because you don’t always have the opportunity to get everybody together at once or in a bigger group,” Mast said.
“So it helps us as leaders to see where skill levels are and what areas we need to focus on moving forward.”
Overall, Mast liked how his crew operated during the simulation in comparison to previous training exercises.
I told my personnel, from where we were at the last acquired structure training, where we had a lot of newer people, their advancement from that time to this time has been significant.
Fredericktown Community Fire District Chief Scott Mast
(Below is an image of the FCFD’s training fire from the Ohio 13 angle. Credit: Jack Slemenda)
