Firefighters from the Archbold and Ridgeville fire departments got together Monday, June 29, to test their ability to flow large volumes of water.
Dave Davis, Archbold fire chief, said the Ridgeville firefighters asked to do some cross training with Archbold.
“We set up a couple of portable tanks to see if we could keep a couple of our large-diameter nozzles supplied,” he said.
If the two departments were called to battle a rural fire together, “we know how we are going to set things up. For the most part, we do the same thing,” Davis said.
Scenario
For the training scenario, Davis said an Archbold pumper truck was set up on Victory Lane near Archbold Evangelical Church, with a large portable tank.
The pumper pumped water to a second pumper truck, which then sprayed water onto the church parking lot.
Water tanker trucks, now known as tenders, unloaded their water into the portable tank, then drove onto Lafayette Street and turned into the north driveway of the church.
At that point, there is a fire hydrant. Another pumper connected to the hydrant and filled the tenders as they pulled up.
Then the tenders went through the church parking lot, stopped next to the portable tank, unloaded, and repeated the process.
“We tried a couple of different evolutions to see what we needed to do,” Davis said.
Fayette
Archbold assisted four other departments at a farm building fire near Fayette on Sunday, June 21.
At that fire, Archbold crews put up their aerial tower, truck No. 101, to spray water down into the building.
“You run a tower out on some barn fires, and it takes an awful lot of water to supply one of those to keep them going to be effective,” Davis said.
“This (training exercise) gives us a little bit better idea of what we might be faced with.”
The exercise was successful.
“We had a debriefing afterwards where we shared the information and opinions, and everybody was really happy with the way it turned out and what we learned from each other,” Davis said.–David Pugh