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Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha
The Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills fire departments came together to make the new training building a reality.
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Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha
Justin Baker, left, chats with Christian Elliott, who designed the new training building.
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Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha
The new live-fire training building can simulate various structures.
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Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha
The new live-fire training building will help with recruiting new fire fighters.
Firefighters from Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills spent this week watching a training building go up like a Lego set — steel sections lifted, turned and bolted, four stories of it, on the training ground on East Street. When it’s finished, they will set it on fire and walk in. Somebody must practice the worst day of your life before you live it.
Ordered from Lonestar Tactical Buildings of Magnolia, Texas, the live-fire structure is the centerpiece of the Over the Mountain Regional Training Center, which the two cities share. Built from repurposed shipping containers, it covers roughly 5,000 square feet. Five rooms are rated for live fire, with burn boxes that vent to the outside.
Inside is a purpose-built obstacle course: forcible-entry doors, standard and commercial stairwells, a balcony, a roof prop, a hotel-style corridor, rope rescue anchors, and mannequins staged on beds and couches. The layout can simulate a single-family house, a multifamily building or a commercial structure, including the large homes that fill both cities.
“Ten years ago, we started training together with Vestavia Hills, and it morphed into Auto Aid, when both fire departments are dispatched automatically to the same fire,” Mountain Brook Battalion Chief Justin Baker said. “We dispatch together. It makes sense to train together.”
The departments train together quarterly.
“This new facility gives us company training, officer training, live-fire, hazmat, rope rescue and much more,” Baker said.
Mountain Brook carries a Class 2 Insurance Services Office rating and Vestavia Hills a Class 1, both near the top of the state, and training hours help earn them.
The site holds another burn building that opened in 2017. Before that, the departments relied on the Alabama Fire College’s mobile live-fire unit rolling into town.
“It’s a huge improvement,” said Vestavia Hills training officer Christian Elliott, who designed the building alongside Lonestar. “We knew what we needed: different scenarios, different levels of expertise, all in one building.”
The center has been an Alabama Fire College training site for four years, and the departments teach the 400-hour recruit school together.
“Four hundred hours covers everything: forcible entry, fire attack, search and rescue, ventilation,” Mountain Brook Fire Chief Chris Mullins said. “Now we can simulate all of it for recruits and for veterans.”
Paying for it took both City Councils. Vestavia Hills approved slightly more than $1 million toward construction, and Mountain Brook contributed the site and the new classroom.
“Our city manager and mayor met with every fireman, and the need for a training building came out of that,” Vestavia Hills Fire Chief Marvin Green said. “Mayor Curry heard the firefighters and secured the funding. This is a great example of what happens when two cities come together for their citizens.”
“It will help with recruitment,” Mullins said. “Young guys want to be in a burn building. It’s a draw.”
They need one. Mullins said the applicant pool has thinned over his career.
“In 1992, you had thousands of people in Jefferson County sitting for the test,” he said. “Now it’s a fraction of that.”
The danger is part of it.
“A hundred firefighters die nationally every year,” Mullins said. “You do this to serve the community, to be part of the brotherhood, part of something bigger than yourself.”
Deputy Chief Brent Cooper puts it this way.
“The calling to be a firefighter is almost religious,” he said. “You’re called to do this, to serve your city and your community. But you must have the passion to do it.”
Crews start running the structure in late August — mannequins on beds and couches, smoke rolling down a hallway toward a door that opens only for a shoulder. Two cities’ crews learning the way in the dark, so on the night it’s real, they already know it.
