TRAINING WITH FIRE

In an evening that would turn to night lit by a white-orange glow on Thursday, May 4, around 45 volunteer firefighters representing seven departments from Phillips County and beyond arrived to a field at the west edge of Holyoke. There, Black Hills Energy, based in Sidney, Nebraska, had set up five stations designed to spit fire in particular ways from a pit, a vehicle’s hood, a T-shaped pipe, a gas meter and – finally – a junker car.

Occasional splashes of lightning rimmed the surrounding clouds and yet, aside from a sprinkling of rain beginning around 8:30 p.m., the storm did little to disrupt the proceedings on the ground. When firefighters reached the last station past 9, the moon reflected off a miniature lake set in the mud by a constant stream of hoses. Sloshing through images of clouds in the water, firefighters approached the waiting vehicle as it started to burn.

This “fire demo,” according to Kamron Weisshaar, operations supervisor for Black Hills, simulates particular incidents a firefighter could encounter in the field. For example, with the aforementioned pit – which he called a “bell hole” – an emergency could arise if a resident digging with a backhoe happened to hit a gas line.

Fire Chief Stacy Rueter of the Holyoke Volunteer Fire Department considered the set-up to be “probably the best training we’ve had in a long time.” Among the highlights, he cited a new fire extinguisher with a powder charged specifically for natural gas-based blazes, as modeled by the demo’s first station.

“It puts it out instantly, pretty much,” he said, a statement backed up when witnessing the device in action. “It seems we have more incidents with natural gas [around here], and if we ever need it, it’s nice to be trained on it.”

Guided by Arlen Thompson, a fire training expert contracted by Black Hills, volunteer firefighters also learned to control a gas fire blowing up against a building in the second station, contain a fire from a “gas asset” in the third and actually spray down flames to shut off a gas meter in the fourth. The fifth station, Weisshaar called “the main event.”

“We have a car on top of what we simulate as one of our assets,” he said. “We set it on fire.

“We actually train them on how to go up to it, control the fire, check the inside of a car for a victim, and then... put a shepherd’s hook over the top, and use a tow truck or another apparatus to pull it off of our asset.”

Getting Black Hills to host such an event in the local area has been a years-long process, Rueter said, and this is the utility company’s first training in Holyoke. Black Hills attempts to hold these events on an annual basis at different locations across its “entire natural gas territory,” according to  Weisshaar: This includes Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas and Iowa, in addition to Colorado.

While he does not know how far back the training goes, Weisshaar said Black Hills has provided instruction at least since he started with the company in 2013.

“We try to get two in each state,” he said on Thursday. “We actually had one in Pagosa Springs two nights ago.”

Tom Henley, community affairs manager for Black Hills, called the training “one of the most important things the company does.”

“We want everyone to come home safely from a day’s work, whether it’s our folks or firefighters,” he said. “We want to make sure they’re properly trained to deal with these types of events.”

When a fire emergency occurs, Weisshaar added, volunteer firefighters are typically the people Black Hills personnel “will see on the scene.” Bringing them up to speed with new techniques, he said, helps the company build a partnership with local communities.

“I was a volunteer firefighter for 10 years,” he said. “It feels good to get everyone together and continue those relationships.”

Those who arrived for the day’s training included volunteer firefighters from Holyoke, Haxtun, Fleming, Ovid, Amherst, Sandhills and Julesburg – personnel from Julesburg needed to leave early, owing to a fire up north in Sedgwick County.