FIREMEN REACH NEW HEIGHTS

Cape Girardeau firefighters spent the greater part of the morning Friday crawling around the hallways of the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the Towers North residential complex, training for a high-rise fire.

"We were very fortunate to be able to do this kind of training," explained fire Chief Robert L. Ridgeway. "The university is about to completely renovate the Towers North complex, so they gave us a week to use the building for our purposes."

The fire department put black plastic over the windows in the students' rooms and used special machines to flood the hallways with smoke. The machines made a smoke with a vanilla extract derivative that's harmless and doesn't displace oxygen in the building.

"We have the fire marked -- there won't be any real flames -- and there are some victims they're going to have to find and rescue," he said.

But everything else was as if there was an actual fire in the complex.

The first unit arrived at the building and began its ascent of the stairwell to find the fire. The ladder crew arrived on the scene a few minutes later.

Each crew of the department worked with a different scenario. The crew Friday was told that a fire started in a dorm room and, due to a excessive number of decorations on the walls of the room, quickly spread to the next room. Not all students were accounted for. Firefighters were fed reports that screams of people trapped inside could be heard from below.

Teams of firefighters were held up in the stairways, as safety officers read the circumstances of the fire step by step.

At times the fire was too hot to enter the floor, later the smoke was too heavy to see anything, then the firefighters were told they had no water pressure in the hose lines and had to back off.

Throughout the scenario, there was communication between firefighters on different floors and the incident commander outside the building. Captains and team leaders fought to keep track of their men while searching for the fire and the victims scattered around the three floors.

A rehabilitation area was set up in the floor below the fire. As firefighters pulled out, they came to the floor below.

"In a real situation, they would have called for a second or even a third alarm," said Scott City Fire Chief Les Crump, who worked as a safety officer during the training scenarios. "There's just not the personnel here today that you'd have in a real high-rise fire, so we're making due with what we've got."

Crump said he held firefighters in the stairwell for several minutes after they arrived to simulate the time it would take to lay and charge hoses in a real fire.

"A fire in a high rise building is like fighting a fire in a stack of basements," said Ridgeway. "It's hot and smoky, and you can't just break the windows out for ventilation.

"Since you're working so far up off the ground, there's no telling where that glass will fall," he said. "So we've got to use the stairwell to move the smoke off the floors and out of the building."

During the exercise, when the doors were opened on the bottom or top floors, the hallways acted as vacuums, sucking the smoke out and pushing fresh air in.

Ridgeway said that in reality, the safest place for a person living in a high-rise complex to stay during the fire is in his room.

"This building is all cinder block and concrete," said Ridgeway. "If students stayed in their rooms and waited for us to come, it would reduce the chance of the fire spreading from room to room and reduce their chances of getting hurt. When the fire is contained in the hallway, there's not many places it can go."

Although firefighters used the stairways for the exercise, Ridgeway said the department would use the elevators, if possible, in a real fire to move personnel and equipment to the floor below the one on fire.

"Right now, we have to hook into the standpipes on the floor below," said Ridgeway. "When the building (Towers North) is renovated this summer, it will be equipped with a sprinkler system. But we'll still have the standpipes as a water source on each floor."

After the fire was "put out," screams could be heard from somewhere on the fifth floor. In the search that followed, firefighters found one more victim.

"It's easy to get turned around in these places," said Crump. "That's why you have training like this. So when the real thing happens, you have an idea of what you're going into, and hopefully, mistakes won't happen."