Practicing to put out fires
Firefighters use empty house on Main Street to conduct training exercise
MARSHALL — Firefighters were gathered at a Marshall address on Tuesday night — but this time, there was no emergency.
The Marshall Fire Department was using an empty house on West Main Street to conduct training exercises and a controlled burn.
Marshall Fire Chief Quentin Brunsvold said the house, which didn’t have close neighbors or other structures nearby, offered a unique opportunity for fire training.
“There’s really nothing around this building,” Brunsvold said. “We don’t have that very often.”
If the house had next-door neighbors, the Fire Department normally wouldn’t even consider using it, he said.
The Fire Department planned to use the house for practice putting out fires, and possibly for some search and rescue training.
Brunsvold said the training opportunity arose when the property’s owner, Charles Bladholm, offered it for the Fire Department to use. The site seemed like a good fit, and the Fire Department also worked with a training provider to evaluate the building for potential hazards.
The Fire Department had originally planned to do a day of fire training at the house in early October, together with other area fire departments. However, extreme dry conditions and high winds at the time meant it was too risky to train.
Southwest Minnesota is still very dry now, but conditions Tuesday weren’t as risky, Brunsvold said. A big part of it was that there was less wind.
“The forecast was about as favorable as it was going to be for today,” Brunsvold said.
It also worked out that Tuesday was a normal training night for the MFD.
Brunsvold said the training firefighters would be doing was “Kind of a down-and-dirty version of what we were planning.”
They would likely be practicing different ways to suppress a fire, and running fire hoses to a fire’s area of origin. They could also do search and rescue training or VEIS training, he said. VEIS — short for “vent, enter, isolate and search” — is an approach for finding and rescuing potential victims in a building on fire, Brunsvold said.
Brunsvold said the Fire Department was working together with a training provider for Tuesday’s training.