BENTONVILLE, Ark. — The motto for the city of Bentonville is “serving with courage, integrity, and compassion," and now with a new interactive training facility, the Bentonville Fire Department is able to achieve this motto by rededicating their efforts to life-saving training exercises.
On the first floor is a kitchen fire, the second floor imitates a bedroom fire, and on the third floor is a balcony-barbecue fire scenario.
"It's kind of an apartment set up more on the second floor then the tower is more like a hire rise structure, and so we get to smoke it up and get some flames in there. There are also three mazes set up so we can get it dark and have the firefighters go through and train in those maze areas," Bentonville Fire Chief Justin Scantlin explained.
Chief Scantlin says the new facility offers better training, recruitment, and benefits to the community.
"There's a lot of situations that we've not been able to train on in the past but this gives us the availability to. We might have had the scenario but we didn't have the smoke to go with it or the sound to go with it," Chief Scantlin stated.
Additionally, the new facility reduces environmental impacts and limits exposure for crews.
"It does help us follow our cancer protocols and keeps the guys from being exposed to any carcinogens ... In this environment it's clean and they can come out and go right back into service," Scantlin said.
In Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville was the only major city that did not provide this type of training for emergency personnel, Scantlin says it's a necessity for the department.
"In the past, we've only been able to train with acquired structures, and that really limited the amount of training we could do. With the new training facility we can replicate the training over and over again, and get all of our crews through consistently," says Scantlin.
The fire department says it's working to add even more props to other levels of the building. The new facility will host its official grand opening to the public Wednesday, May 24th.
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