Fire departments throughout Orange County came together this morning to hone their skills in moving water to a fire scene. The scenario was made up but similar situations happen daily thoughout our state; a local fire department responds to a reported building fire in an area without pressurized fire hydrants. Neighboring departments are dispatched to respond with tanker truck for the water supply while another department dispatches an engine company to a water source to refill the tanker trucks.
For this morning's drill, the incident scene was a little over a mile away from the nearest water source. Tankers from every Orange County based fire department as well as a tanker from North Chatham Fire department responded to the scene and dumped their water into a folding tank that had been placed by the on scene engine company. Once empty, hey went to the fill up location, reloaded with water then returned and dumped again. Each truck repeated this process multiple times throughout the morning.
Within the first hour of the drill, we had hauled more than 36,000 gallons of water to the improvised fire scene.
Drills like this keep our firefighters and drivers ready for when the real incident occurs and gives us an oportunity to evaluate our processes and make improvements.
We want to thank Efland Fire, Eno Fire, New Hope Fire, Orange Grove Fire, Cedar Grove Fire, Caldwell Fire, White Cross Fire, Carrboro Fire and North Chatham Fire for sending your tankers and personnel to the training.
We want to thank Chapel Hill Fire for providing the fire scene engine and crew and last but not least, we want to thank our own dedicated personnel at Orange Rurall for spending thier time off, at work training to become better.