The exercises took place near Westwood Drive in a soon-to-be demolished home and gave the participating firefighters an opportunity to practice both basic and advanced firefighting techniques.

Milton’s Fire Chief John Reble pointed out that the exercises also help improve communication between the three organizations.  “This was a good opportunity to work together with our mutual-aid partners in a realistic training environment.  These exercises will greatly improve future joint operations on the actual fire ground,” Reble said.

Drills conducted by the firefighters included breaching, controlling ground floor or basement fires, victim rescue, stair collapses, window exfiltration, and several other scenarios.  To make the drills more realistic, the training officers used a burn barrel filled with hay, which produced large amounts of smoke inside the condemned structure, reducing the firefighters’ visibility to just a few feet.

“We don’t usually get the opportunity to practice on acquired structures.  We were very happy that we were offered a building where we could conduct training evolutions without disrupting traffic or the surrounding residents,” Reble added.

To provide additional training opportunities, the City of Milton has approved a plan to build a training facility for firefighters that could accommodate training scenarios like the one conducted last week.

According to Chief Reble, “Our training facility is currently in the design stages.  Once it’s built, it will offer similar realistic training opportunities.  We are set to begin sitework on that facility early next year and we hope to start building as soon as possible afterwards.”

For more information, please contact the City of Milton at 850-983-5400, or email us at [email protected].