Tremendous Is Word for Texas A&M Fire School
—Staff photos
Tremendous—as in Texas—is the one word that describes the 49th Annual Texas Firemen’s Training School. More than 1800 students participated in training with some 450 instructors at the 65-acre Brayton Firemen Training Field on the Texas A&M University campus at College Station last July 23-28.
Flammable liquid pits containing mock-ups of a petroleum loading dock, petroleum plant and a chemical plant are large enough to require the use of two or three monitor nozzles in addition to four to six hand lines to extinguish the training fires.
During the course of the municipal school, when these photos were taken, and the industrial school week, some 300,000 gallons of flammable liquids, most of it waste fuel, of various types are burned. During both these weeks, about 20,000 gallons of LPG are burned. Following the industrial school is a week-long Spanish school each year.
LPG facility
A new facility this year is a spacious LPG training area with gas piped underground to a Christmas tree, a 250-gallon storage tank and a bobtail LPG truck. The latter two, of course, are modified to preclude any explosive buildup of gas, but the piped gas outlets provide real hot fires demanding safe use of fog streams to shut off the valves. The facility, which replaces a smaller one, is a project of the Liquefied Petroleum Division of the Railroad Commission of Texas.
The size of the new area, as well as the area given to pump operations, is as large as the drill ground of many a municipal fire department.
Lunch is a major project in itself, but with the use of buses to get everyone from the training ground to the university cafeteria, everyone is served quickly.
School staff
The school administrative staff of 18 is headed by Chief Henry Smith and it provides administrative and support services for the school. The instructors are all volunteers from both paid and. volunteer fire departments and they include all ranks from fire fighter to chief of department.
In addition to classes at the training field, others held in classrooms include five fire prevention courses, an officer course and sped alized offerings.
The school is sponsored by the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association of Texas.
