News

County to break ground on new burn building

By Melanie Lekocevic

CAIRO — The county will next week break ground on a “burn building” that will help train firefighters to better protect themselves and the community. It’s a project 15 years in the making.

Officials from Greene County Emergency Services began planning for the facility years ago, and it will finally come to fruition Monday when they will break ground for the building’s construction in a lot behind the county’s Emergency Services offices in Cairo.

A burn building is used to train firefighters to safely enter a building, avoid dangerous situations in a burning structure, and to climb aerial ladders, rappel from ropes to practice rescues in the mountains, and the like.

“The burn building is a three-story steel building. Inside, we will have two burn rooms — one on the first floor and one on the second,” said John Farrell, the department’s director. “In those specialized rooms, we will put two pallets of wood and a bale of hay to create enough smoke so we can train our firefighters.”

All fire services in Greene County will be able to train their new department members in the burn building. The training is required by New York state, and until now, fire departments had to travel to Philmont in Columbia County to use their burn building — that means their firehouses had to send their fire trucks out of the county, and all the way across the river, whenever they wanted to train their members.

By the end of this year, Greene County will have its own facility.

“We have been trying to acquire a burn building for at least 15 years,” Farrell said. “The purpose is to give the maximal training to our personnel in the fire services.”

With construction slated to begin Monday, the project should be complete by mid-December. The cost of the structure will be $750,000, and the funds will come out of a county capital fund.

The building will help the county meet state requirements for the training of firefighters, which have become increasingly more stringent.

“Since 9/11, regulations throughout the state for firefighters have changed drastically,” Farrell said. “The education is very intense and has increased to roughly 93 hours. There is testing they have to take, and the state’s fire instructors are now mandated to send the students into a burn building like this.”

Firefighting techniques that students will practice include feeling doors to determine if there are flames in the next room, dealing with smoke, working in a “buddy system,” and how to use an aerial ladder on the fire truck. By completing the training, Greene County’s volunteer firefighters will have much of the same training that firefighters in large cities have undergone.

“They have to practice these things so when they go into a situation in our community, they will be better prepared,” Farrell said. “When they are done with this training, they will have taken the same courses that paid firefighters would take.”

The project is the result of a team effort between the fire departments, the fire advisory board, the public safety committee, the legislature and Interim County Administrator Dan Frank, according to Farrell.

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