A High Rise Fire Training seminar took place Saturday at Danbury Hospital for Danbury Fire Department personnel and area volunteer and paid firefighters.
The seminar was conducted by Chief Ron Kanterman, a fire and life safety consultant with Gold Horn Associates.
The full-day seminar covered aspects of fire fightering under the demanding and different conditions of fighting a blaze in a 6-story or higher building in comparision to fighting a fire in a two or three-story structure. For Danbury, the training was paramont, said Danbury Fire Chief Geoff Herald.
“We have six buildings in the city that are high rise construction and beyond that, we have structures, including The Matrix and Danbury Mall, that pose similar firefighting considerations given their size and configuration,” Geoff said.
“Firefighting operations are extremely labor intensive in these structures,” Kanterman said. “I’m going to have smoke conditions. I need manpower to search every area of every floor for occupants.”
“The interiors of these new buildings are all plastic — the furniture, the computers, the partitions, the phones — with thousands of cables running through the walls,” Kanterman added. “That means high temperatures rising quickly as all of this melts.”
Geoff noted that Danbury is “a big town growing into big city issues. Firefighting is a very dynamic profession, changing significantly all the time. We’ve learned that the science we thought we knew about firefighting is wrong when it comes to these structures.”
Geoff said his plan is to develop a new standard operation procedures for his company and surrounding departments that would be providing mutual aid.