ROANOKE, Va – A string of fires in abandoned homes, like these, is leading Roanoke firefighters to brush up on their skills to make sure they are ready to respond to any situation.
It’s been an unusually busy few days for firefighters across the Roanoke Valley from knocking down kitchen fire before they spread to putting out flames torching abandoned homes.
Tuesday firefighters from multiple agencies put their skills to the test while helping newer members learn the ropes.
“We will sometimes go a month or more and not have a working fire and now in the span of a week we’ve had about five or six,” Roanoke County Fire and Rescue Community Outreach Coordinator Brian Clingenpeel said.
Roanoke City Fire and EMS crews responded to two different vacant homes on fire in the city, not even a day apart.
“With these homes come some challenges for our firefighters that make it even more difficult to fight a fire,” Roanoke Fire-EMS Community Risk Reduction Specialist Kristen Perdue said.
Fire crews from across the region spent the day Tuesday helping their new recruits train for similar scenarios.
“It’s imperative we go into situations all the time, like the past two days, where we have structures that are unsafe, and sometimes we don’t know that they could be unsafe until we get in them,” Perdue said.
Since agencies from different localities typically team up to fight fires, training together makes their response even more seamless.
“It’s very very important that we do this training together to make sure we know each other before that crucial emergency happens and that we understand communications and we’ve all been trained on the same techniques,” Clingenpeel said.
Crews agree that working and learning together protect not only the community but also each other.
“We do this training to ensure our firefighters are safe, we want to make sure that we have a priority that everyone goes home,” Perdue said.
The causes of these fires are still under investigation. The department is asking all businesses and homeowners to make sure their vacant structures are properly closed off to prevent people from entering them and starting fires.