FORT FRANCES – A mobile training facility came to town for a week, and area firefighters flocked to it to learn and sharpen their skills.
The Mobile Live Fire Training Unit, or MLFTU, was stationed at Shevlin Yard in Fort Frances from Aug. 22 to Aug. 28.
Blaze battlers from municipalities and First Nations in the Rainy River district came to the yard during those days for training exercises.
“It is kind of a wonder of engineering,” Dave Robertson, the town’s interim fire chief, said of the MLFTU. “It is a propane-fuelled multifaceted training unit that is hauled around by an 18-wheeler.”
The provincial fire marshal’s office has two of them, the one that came to Fort Frances being specifically for the North, he said.
The wide variety of exercises conducted at the unit include extricating people trapped on an upper floor and finding people inside a burning house, he said.
Robertson said house fires are “not as frequent as they used to be” but more intense and quicker to spread.
The decrease in frequency is thanks largely to better public education on fire prevention, he said.
Changes to fire intensity and speed have everything to do with the amount and type of fuel, the veteran firefighter added.
Simply put, Robertson said, households tend to contain “way more stuff,” which means more fuel for a conflagration.
As for fuel type, he points out that homes contain more “synthetic petroleum-based, plastic-based items that burn differently” than typical household items of past decades.
“The heat release rate is exponentially faster, which means it gets hotter faster. And it travels faster,” he said.
“So when there is a fire, that super-heated smoke moves about the house, heating things in its way, getting them ready for ignition far faster.”
