By Mathias Baden, Correspondent 

Six-foot-high flames leapt from the burner, and temperatures rose by hundreds of degrees, simulating a fire at a warehouse or a big-box retail store. But a person standing upright at the entrance to the concrete and iron tower in Sand Creek Township, near Jordan, wouldn’t necessarily know.

Mike Briese eased back while holding onto the handle of a heavy, metal, first-floor door.

“You can poke your head inside,” he said.

Black, theatrical smoke filled the burn tower, so seeing through the hallway between the door and the next room was nearly impossible.

“That’s why firefighters are always on their knees. If you get in there early enough, you can see better down low,” said Briese, 30-some years a Jordan firefighter and a few months the training manager at a state-funded regional training center for public safety personnel.

This month, without fanfare, the Scott County Association for Leadership and Efficiency (SCALE) opened its regional public safety training center along Valley View Drive.

Two years ago, SCALE – an organization that includes representatives from the county and many of the cities and townships within it – received $1 million from the Minnesota Legislature to start the process of transforming a National Register of Historic Places landmark for reuse.

The grand building, which will be used for training classes and exercises, has a storied past as Mudbaden Sulphur Springs in the 1890s, when people came from miles around to have their ailments cured by the mud of the Minnesota River valley. It’s also served other, less suspicious medical purposes and has been a religious retreat and a jail annex, among other things.

This year, SCALE requested $3.2 million to finish the project, but the state agreed to $1 million. Briese said SCALE plans to ask for the $2.2 million in the next bonding bill, which won’t be passed for another two years.

Because members of SCALE pay for the operations of the facility, their police and firefighters are invited to access the site for free.

The first event at SCALE’s facility was a graduation ceremony for the Prior Lake Police Department’s citizens police academy. In the reception area just inside the historic building’s front doors, a video presentation also was given for the academy’s participants.

The events to follow last week included frequent use of the gun ranges, trials of a video simulator meant to help police stay sharp, and a class of 20-plus firefighters who learned how to run the tower burners.

Simulated fires

John Badin, training coordinator for the Savage Fire Department, was one of the trainees in a class last Tuesday to learn how to use the tower. Two days later, he was running drills for a group hosted by the Mdewakanton Emergency Services, the fire department for the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community.

It’s simple, really.

A remote control outside of the first-floor burn room controls the crude-looking machine that is capable of casting 16-foot-high flames into the air and boosting temperatures in the room to somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 degrees.

Use the remote to start the fire. If you let it run its course, the fire would last about four minutes. Pressing the pause button can lengthen the training to as long as 15 minutes, Briese said.

If firefighters want a 5-foot-tall flame to reach 750 degrees, that can easily be achieved in the burn tower, Badin and Briese said.

By coming into the fire at ground level, trainees – this week they were members of the Indiana Army National Guard’s 53rd Civil Support Team – can practice entering a warehouse fire.

The scenario changes to a basement fire, just by entering from the second story. In a basement fire, the heat rises and intensifies for the trainees, because as they come down the stairs above the burner, they come through the heat and close in on the flames.

Trainees can use three different stairways on the outside of the building to access whichever fire they are fighting. Before they get to a fire, they weave through rooms full of fireproof panels that can be reconfigured into a different maze for each training.

Law enforcement uses taller panels for their training sessions so that they cannot see over the walls.

The men and women with the hose would knock the fire down, and the fire would react just as it might in an emergency. If it’s not soaked long enough, it’ll flare up.

A second-story burner works the same way, only it simulates a kitchen fire, even to the point of looking like a commercial stove.

The remote control is in the next room, and those in control knelt nearby and peered through a doorway.

Upstairs, flames could roll across the 8-foot-high ceiling of a smaller room, simulating the burning of natural gases.

“As a firefighter, you don’t want to see that, but you have to be aware of it, that it can happen,” Briese said.

The burn tower is one of the key elements of the training facility, and the burners are much improve the safety and effectiveness of firefighter training, Briese said.

“It’s nearly $500,000 for these two burners,” Scott County facilities director Don Fehr said.

SCALE officials hope to eventually buy burners on the third and fourth floors, as well, Briese said.

The third-floor burner room would feature a bedroom or couch fire. Briese said the room was created in a “plug and play” design, with most of the duct work, gas pipes, standpipe hookups, sprinklers, and special, red caulking completed.

If a burner is added to the fourth floor, SCALE has the room picked out. It’s already got sprinklers installed, but its exact use is to be determined.

Briese said the setup time for using the burn tower is much shorter than it would be for burning down an abandoned house, the typical firefighter drill.

And it can be repeated time and again.

Jordan, for example is a department made up of 35 on-call volunteer firefighters who are paid when they show up for a fire call. A highly skilled department, they can always use more training, Briese said.

“A lot of the volunteers don’t see enough fire,” Briese said.

Firefighters can do most of their training exercises at the facility, including conducting rescues in confined spaces and climbing ladders to three different balconies, and there is more to come.

  Mathias Baden can be reached at (952) 345-6571 or editor@jordannews.com.