Greenwood Firefighters Participate in Live Fire Exercise at Johnson County Fire Grounds with Neighboring Departments
(L to R) Assistant Chief John Burgoyne, Probationary Firefighter Greg Garcia, Firefighter Doug Smith, Lieutenant Ben Roberts, Lieutenant John Young, Captain Sheldon Scott and Weatherford College Fire Instructor David Houston. Chief Louis Ramos took the picture.
On Saturday December 3rd, seven of Greenwood’s firefighters participated in live burn training at the Johnson County burn house just outside Cleburne. The live burn training is really a refresher course that the firefighters participate in annually. The burn house is a specially constructed concrete block house in which materials are burned to simulate the heat and smoke that the firefighters encounter in a real structure fire.
The team practiced rescue exercises, entering the building with smoke so think they couldn’t see anything and then they did a “blind search” trying to find a hidden dummy. They then had to wrestle the very heavy dummy to freedom – its backbreaking work and the Greenwood boys were all exhausted by the end of the day.
Other local departments who participated in the drill were Adell-Whitt VFD, Brock-Dennis VFD, Cool-Garner VFD, and Millsap VFD. In addition to rescue work the firefighters did several other exercises including simulating getting lost in a fire and extinguishing fires on both the first and second floors.
Greenwood and the other participating departments train together once a month year around. Chief Ramos said “these are the departments which we work with the most on real emergencies and it makes a lot of sense for us to train together. That way, when we have the real thing, we are working with teammates, not strangers.”
All the participants said that this was a great training and they already have started thinking about new wrinkles they can add to the training next year.