Cambridgeshire Fire & Rescue Service’s (CFRS) new community fire station and training centre at St John’s Park, north of Huntingdon, is another landmark project for Crofton Engineering, coming as it commemorates a 70-year history of building specialist steel structures and fire service training facilities.
One of Crofton’s first projects for the then Cambridge County Council was a steel fire-drill tower at Linton that is still used today. Crofton Engineering has now completed over 700 fire-training projects in the UK and internationally and become a market leader in the fabrication and installation of steel structures and specialist fire-training buildings. It also offers a comprehensive range of products designed to provide effective training scenarios for firefighters, include a variety of cold smoke and USAR buildings.
Sustainability is at the heart of the St John’s Park design for CFRS, – a functional, economical, low-maintenance building. Budgeted at over £10.5 million, it will provide reliable and realistic training for all operational firefighters and dramatically increase CFRS’ capacity to train firefighters.
The training area, purpose-built and installed by Crofton Engineering, allows CFRS to create realistic training exercises including live fire-training containers, incidents involving water and motor vehicles, and a four-storey training tower.
The main training building (MTB) is 12m x 12m and includes facilities to simulate cold smoke and LPG fires. It is a compartment building which contains everything you would find in a residential or commercial building, including stairs, rooms, hallways, corridors and garages. It allows for a multitude of applicable training scenarios. Cold Smoke is available in all rooms and on all floors and there is also facility to control the smoke in each room independently.
It is equipped with three computer-controlled gas-fuelled fires and prepared for additional fires in the future. With different rooms and entrances, the long corridor can be used for a dual hallway flashover simulation to practise door opening and attack procedures. On the second floor, a multi-prop fire can be used for a bedroom, living room or small kitchen. All training rooms are equipped with high-capacity smoke machines for very obscured visibility. Dry risers are installed on all floors to provide realistic situation training.
The training centre also includes a training tower for rope rescue, rescue from height and safe working at height training. The training tower includes capabilities for aerial ladder fire training and rescue, and a lift shaft for various other difficult rescue scenarios.
There are three real-fire training buildings: the Compartmental Fire Behaviour Training Unit, the Fire Development Attack Training Unit and a Real Fire Training Building over three floors. This includes scenarios for commercial units on the ground floor, flats on the second floor and attic and loft space on the top floor.
Training instructors have a large amount of flexibility to alter all aspects of the fire development as they see fit, meaning that firefighters will never know the scenario in advance and will therefore be required to adapt to whatever occurs during the exercise. This makes training far more effective and applicable to the real world.
This new facility will greatly improve operational training for Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue services with a future-proof, sustainable design that allows firefighters to develop to their maximum potential.
For more information, contact Crofton Engineering at www.crofton-eng.co.uk
You must be logged in to post a comment.