‘It’s not just a rescue.’ Central Kentucky firefighters train for structural collapses

After Thursday, 30 firefighters across Central Kentucky will officially be trained to handle structural collapse situations like what happened in western Kentucky last December during a deadly tornado outbreak.

The eight-day, 80-hour course wrapped up on Thursday at the Lexington Fire Department’s training facility with a structural collapse demonstration meant to simulate what search and rescue efforts would be like after a disaster. The scenario was meant to simulate a tornado disaster and it featured one partially-collapsed building and one totally-collapsed structure.

The 30 trainees, 19 of which are employed by the Lexington Fire Department, all have some type of technical rescue training on their resume. They were divided up into multiple, smaller squadrons for the demonstration and applied shoring, breaching & breaking, lifting and moving techniques.

Brett Beach, an instructor with Spec International brought in to teach the course, said he hopes the trainees walk away with the skills necessary to help with structural collapse rescues and to have the ability to understand how the scene works as a big picture.

“It’s not just a rescue that happens,” Beach said. “There is a whole other team that has come in – the incident management team, logistical team, communications. All those things have to coordinate together so the rescue can happen.”

Beach served as a rescue team manager during the Surfside condominium collapse in Florida that left 98 people dead. He described that experience as overwhelming and said Thursday’s training demonstration is very realistic compared to real-life disasters.

“Ever since 9/11, all of those teams and all of those people that responded to 9/11 have spent the last 20 years making sure that the training was applicable to 9/11, to a collapse,” Beach said.

To make it more realistic, a number of variables were implemented into the demonstration, such as generators going out, rising gas levels that causes rescuers to retreat, change of managerial plans and the natural exhaustion that comes after seven 10-hour days of training.

How was this training funded?

The entire structural collapse training course was paid for by the Department of Homeland Security through a federal grant. It cost $47,700.

The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security oversees federal grants from DHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The grant used to pay for the course was created to prepare for terrorism, according to Josiah Keats, executive director for the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security.

“The cost pales in comparison to the benefits that we get out of it,” Keats said. “I definitely feel like we have some of the best trained emergency responders in the nation, and this only helps to further that.”