Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
First of more to come
Fayetteville Fire Department opens its new training center.
Family, friends and community members walked up six flights of stairs, gazed up shafts and watched firefighters rappel down the side of the Fayetteville Fire Department’s new training center Thursday afternoon.
The 7,000-square-foot training tower provides a safe and secure environment for firefighters from Northwest Arkansas to practice a wide range of skills, including confined space operation, forceful entry, rope rescues and roof ventilation, said fire chief David Dayringer.
“Historically, the Fayetteville Fire Department has never had a formal training facility or area where practical and hands-on skills can be practiced,” Dayringer said at the center’s opening. Firefighters used parking decks, storm drains, concrete rubble piles or went to the Rogers or Lincoln facilities. “Training in a facility designed for that purpose is inherently safer than storm drains or rubble piles.”
Fayetteville firefighters aren’t the only ones amping up their training game. A similar center is being built in Springdale and improvements are being discussed in Rogers. Across the nation, more training centers
are being built largely as a product of FEMA money and to increase department ratings and recruitment, officials said.
MONEY FOR CENTERS
The center sits on 14 acres at 2505 E. Borick Drive, near the industrial park in south Fayetteville. A grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Assistance to Firefighters Grant program and the Department of Homeland Security covered 90 percent of the $668,377 training tower and the city provided the remaining 10 percent.
The grant required the center to be up and running by May 15, but FEMA granted the department an extension to July 15, Dayringer said.
“The purchase of this training tower is the greatest, most far-reaching demonstration of support that the mayor and the City Council has shown for this department probably in the history of the city of Fayetteville,” he said. “As a result, firefighters will be better trained and safer than ever before.”
Springdale is getting its own facility. The City Council unanimously approved the $138,305 purchase of 4.82 acres from the Public Facilities Board in the Springdale Industrial Park in February.
Fire Chief Mike Irwin said in February he hoped the four-story training center would be completed in April, but weather delays pushed the time frame into July, he said.
“We’ve needed one for a long time. We virtually have nowhere to train,” Irwin said. “We kind of ad lib as best we can with what we have here so we needed to increase that ability quite a bit.”
VERSATILE TRAINING NEARBY
Firefighters in Northwest Arkansas have been training in Rogers and at Southern Arkansas University’s fire academy satellite center in Lincoln for a couple decades.
Departments rack up traveling and overtime expenses sending firefighters to get the required 20 training hours per month when they don’t have their own center. Dayringer and Irwin said this was a motivator in getting their own.
“The benefits we’ve seen from having our own training center is local delivery of state, regional and national classes at a savings to our city with regard to travel, lodging and tuition expense to attend those classes off site,” said Dennis Thurman, Rogers training division captain. “It allows us to train a large number of our members in these same classes again without the expense of that experience somewhere else.”
Dayringer said the Fayetteville center will allow firefighters to leave a training session and respond to an emergency quickly, instead of leaving the department short staffed.
He said he hopes the facility will host many regional training events. They will be using it for monthly job performance requirements and for six-week academies, the first of which will start in July.
RANKING, MONEY, RECRUITING
More training centers are popping up around the country and Kerry Fierke said he would have never thought his company would be getting so much business when it opened 14 years ago. Fierke is spokesman for American Fire Training Centers, the Illinois-based company that built the Fayetteville and Springdale centers.
Harley Hunt, Fayetteville assistant fire chief, said he thinks FEMA is responsible for the growing number of training centers.
“FEMA has identified these facilities as being high priority in their grant structure and so a lot of people are putting in for them and are getting them,” he said. “It’s changing the way we train.”
The Fire Suppression Rating Schedule measures the major elements of a community’s fire protection system and develops a numerical grade system of points that translates into a one through 10 rating, one being the best, according to the Insurance Service Office, a for-profit organization that provides statistical information on risk, according to the ISO website.
A better ISO ranking can help lower fire insurance premiums in an area.
Thurman said Rogers gained several ISO points in the training area during their last assessment. The department administrators are looking at further updating the facility and are “in the process of projecting what that update will be and identifying a funding source for those improvements,” he said.
Irwin said wanting to boost Springdale’s ranking from a 2 to a 1 was part of the reason the department decided to build a training center.
“Keeping the crews proficient is ultimately what we are after,” he said.
A better ranking can also boost the chance of receiving grants. Grant writing became one of Dayringer’s initiatives when he became Fayetteville’s fire chief in 2010.
FEMA provides further incentives with its grant program, which paid for Fayetteville’s training tower.
“These FEMA grants have started an industry of many ventures building these types of buildings,” Hunt said.