Burning down the house
Firefighters did the opposite of their job a few days after Christmas.
The house at 60 Lyndhurt Drive burned to the ground Thursday after the Bella Vista Fire Department capped off weeks of training.
Allowing it to burn to the ground, Capt. Seth Kallick said, was to show firefighters how a fire travels through a structure. Safety was the top priority.
Teams were standing by, he said, to keep the surrounding ground wet and hunt down any escaping flames.
“This is how you learn,” Kallick said.
Having a home like this, he said, provides training that would simply be impossible otherwise.
Kallick said this was not a frivolous endeavor. He cannot get authorization for a fire like this, he said, without proving there is a training purpose.
Training like this, Fire Chief Steve Sims said, can help the firefighters be safer and more efficient, and it makes a good team-building exercise. It also gives firefighters a chance to practice some skills they might not get to work on as often, he said, such as ventilation of a structure. Ventilation, which involves cutting a hole in the roof, allows heat to escape.
He was appreciative, he said, of the property owners who supplied the house.
Those owners, Wendy and Larry Lott, have lived near the house they donated for years. They’ve always loved the lot, which is on a long point that extends into Lake Rayburn, they said. When the place went up for sale, they went for it.
The problem, Larry Lott said, is that the house itself, which was built in the mid-1970s, aged out of usefulness. Lott said that the home was the very first built on Lyndhurst Drive, and, with its age, he couldn’t get insurance on it.
When he looked into getting the home demolished, he said, he discovered the Fire Department is often looking for something to use for practice.
This, he said, works out for everyone. The Fire Department gets a practice space, and his expenses are drastically reduced — he has to pay for removal of whatever is left and that’s about it. Wendy Lott said, “A lot of it’s gotten used, that’s the good thing.”
It was a sturdy house, Capt. Kallick said, built modularly in Wausau, Wisc. Each room was assembled separately, he said, then put together on-site.
“They just put it down and built it like you’d build Legos,” Kallick said.
Leading up to the final fire, even the morning before any fires were lit, Kallick had firefighters training for demolition and extrication. Some of the drills were good practice for punching through walls, or crawling through them. Some holes they cut, he said, were far smaller than one might actually make, but provided a good simulation of getting through a small space with a full set of gear, including an air tank.
In one drill, Kallick had firefighters try to hack through the incredibly sturdy floor with an axe. This, he said, was to teach them that if the axe isn’t cutting it, it might be time for a chainsaw.
“Fire isn’t preplanned, you’ve got to get someone in there,” Kallick said. “I don’t want to hear ‘there’s a board in the way,’ tell me what tool you need to take care of it.”
Kallick started the final training by setting a pair of small fires on the house’s mid level, showing the flow of smoke through the building — then putting the fires out before they could spread.
Firefighters gathered behind the building to watch the fire start as Kallick and firefighter-paramedic Patrick Hudson went into the lower level, as water trickled from the small fires they just put out. Kallick set piled-up mattresses and pallets aflame with a propane torch before trotting back out the door.
The view into the windows went black almost instantly. Two floors up, on the opposite side of the building, smoke was starting to pour into the sky through the one open window.
Smoke seeped from around the bottom-floor windows and, thanks to the bright sunshine, could be seen swirling inside. A faint orange glow became visible after a few minutes. Heat and pressure built inside the house. The windows cracked, then finally broke and fell. Smoke quickly filled the air behind the house. A dull haze hung in the air, fanned by an eager wind.
The backyard was not habitable for long after the windows gave way.
Kallick said the fire was started at the bottom of the structure, near the center, in order to take out the main supports early on. The holes he had firefighters bash into walls during training were placed with purpose. He’d engineered this fire, he said, to result in the home collapsing in on itself, in order to be safer and reduce the likelihood of flames spreading outside the home.
As the fire spread, the temperature around the house rose. By the time flames were visible from the front, it was warm. By the time the fire was visible through every front window, the home’s front yard was an unbearably hot space, particularly for anyone without firefighter bunker gear, anyone who’s just an ordinary guy.
Until it reached that point, however, firefighters enjoyed the show. Without the danger a fire typically poses, they posed for and snapped photos, holding tight until flames engulfed most of the house. They were close enough but not too far. Then the party was over. Kallick’s plan worked. After burning down the house for a while, wood could be heard crackling, popping as loud as firecrackers. The roof bowed more every minute until it was too much. The roof dropped. The walls fell in, aside from one section near the front. The whole thing went down without jumping overboard onto the neighbors’ property.
While a real fire is never planned out, he said, this still provides a chance for firefighters to see how it all works in the flesh. Or flame.
“Without structures like this,” he said, “we couldn't do that.”