"A Successful Day" - Fire Department Completes Live-Burn Training

Wednesday, January 31st, 2024

On any other day, the goal for Dalton firefighters is to keep a house from burning to the ground. On Tuesday, the mission was the opposite: burn a down a donated house, while first gaining valuable training and experience for some young firefighters.

"Any time we can do training that we’re not used to getting in the form of acquired structure burns, it’s invaluable for (firefighters) young and old," said Keith Dempsey, the DFD's training coordinator. "We just don’t get the exposure to it as much as we could, due to the lack of these resources being available. But having two structures on one property that we’ve been able to use over the course of the last nine or ten months has been incredible. This is the culmination of it."

Caption: Two Dalton firefighters watch as the house at 129 Keith Street collapses after the structure was burned as part of a series of training exercises 

The abandoned houses at 131 and 129 Keith Street were donated to the fire department in 2023 by Christian Heritage School which owns the property. The school wanted the property cleared for future use and agreed to allow firefighters to use the structures for training in exchange for leveling them when they were finished. The donation proved invaluable for the department, providing more than 11 months of various on-site "real world" training activities for firefighters not just from the DFD, but also neighboring agencies. In addition to the training burns that ultimately consumed the structures, the houses were also used for search and rescue training and other courses in the months before the fires were lit. 

The house at 129 Keith Street was burned to the ground during a November 2023 training exercise, but the dry conditions that day weren't suitable for a fire at the neighboring structure which was closer to a stand of pine trees. Firefighters instead waited until Tuesday to finish off 129 Keith Street.  

"It was so, so dry when we burned the first time, and with this structure being so close to this stand of pine trees we just couldn’t risk it," Dempsey said. "These evergreen trees are basically gasoline anyway on a good day because they’re so heavy in oils so we knew we didn’t want to mess with that and had to wait until we had significant precipitation before we could safely light this one."

Caption: A Dalton firefighter monitors the fire as the structure is allowed to burn down

The house that was burned during Tuesday's training was smaller than the structure burned in November without an attic or ceilings or many interior rooms so it was much easier to burn down. But the department was still able to get plenty of training mileage out of the morning. 

"(The house had) no finishing, no dry wall, no ceilings, just open studs with the exception of a small kitchen and a small bathroom. So, not a lot to play with, just an open box and we were fearful that fire would get away from us quicker than it did," Dempsey said. "They managed two pretty in-depth fire dynamics lessons in there in separate burns before we let it go....we had a successful day."

The training exercises at the Keith Street property are the latest example of the Dalton Fire Department's training division going out of its way to find new and unique ways to train its firefighters to be ready for the unexpected. Several years ago, the department took advantage of several days of sub-freezing temperatures and icy conditions on area lakes and pond to perform ice rescue training at Lakeshore Park. The fire department has also been welcomed into office buildings and factories of various area businesses over the years to conduct other "real world" training to get firefighters outside of their usual training facility and outside of their comfort zone. 

"(You wake up and say) what can we do today?" Dempsey said. "What can we do that's outside of the box and different and show our people a little bit different perspective and help them take care of some of those what-ifs that are out there?" 

Caption: More scenes from Tuesday's training burn