Train with the largest fire equipment
Published: 02 April, 2009
Texas Engineering Extension Service’s Chris Framsted met up with IFJ in Houston to talk about the latest developments at the famous training academy.
It is no longer necessary to travel all the way to the USA to gain a qualification from Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), in College Station, Texas. The world-renowned training facility now offers training in over 50 countries all over the world. Firefighters can now follow TEEX accredited courses in their own language and geared towards their own local culture. “The fire school has been in operation since 1929 and TEEX has some of the best curriculum for firefighters, rescue, hazmat, and emergency response personnel,” said international training co-ordinator for TEEX, Chris Framsted, at the Industrial Safety and Security Exhibition in Houston, Texas, last February. Apart from setting up its own classes in a preferred location, prospective students can also enrol with one of the 50 Co-operative Learning Centres (CLC), with which TEEX has signed an agreement. They can provide training and certification programmes based upon TEEX curriculum in a student’s native language.
This opens up a range of possibilities for international students who don’t have English as their first language. They can attend courses at any of these selected schools, anywhere in the world and still walk out with a certificate that says Texas Engineering Extension Service on it.
According to Framsted this means a great deal, as TEEX as well as its CLCs only hire the best experts in the world. “These people are by far the best in the field they work in, ranging from HazMat, law enforcement, weapons of mass destruction, municipal or industrial firefighting. The level of training that we put forward and the standards it requires from its instructors by far sets us aside from others.”
To achieve this, TEEX therefore uses its own recruitment for the CLCs instructors, and students follow the same curriculum as students in the US. TEEX ensures that the training props and simulators are up to the same standard as the facilities back in Texas, although they might be built on a smaller scale.
For people who do choose to receive training in the United States, the Brayton Field Training Facility offers anything a firefighter could ever want. “The TEEX facility offers high immersion training that is realistic, large scale, hands on, and extremely exciting. Some students have called it the Disneyland of firefighting,” commented Framsted.
Over 40,000 emergency responders from over 45 countries come to College Station for training every year. Besides conventional firefighting, the 120-acre training ground offers industrial, municipal, HazMat, marine, LPG, LNG, and many other courses, reaching over 80,000 students per year.
The industrial firefighting course, for instance, gives students the chance to gain a worldwide recognised qualification as Industrial Emergency Response Specialists.
In addition, the facility features 23 live-burn props and five multi-level projects with more than 100 total leak points. Especially attractive for industrial firefighters is a chemical complex, a process unit, an ARFF simulator, rail car loading racks, an aerial cooler, marine training facilities, LNG, etc.
The new process unit is the largest industrial fire prop in the world, and is fuelled by both liquid hydrocarbons and propane. It has the structure and equipment found in process units of both refining and chemical industries, and includes sets of double pumps simulating various leaks, overhead flange leaks, small aerial cooler tube ruptures, a large aerial cooler flange failure, a grating-covered drainage trough, and various vessels.
Framsted points out that protecting the environment is important to TEEX, despite being built on such a large scale. “For the firefighting props we use propane, LPG or EIII. EIII is a fuel product that dissipates smoke incredibly quickly. For example, it can create a large fireball, and then smoke, but within seconds this smoke has dissipated.
A facility as large as TEEX uses a large amount of water which is all recycled by the training school’s brand new $15m dollar water recycling system. “We use tonnes of water, as well as foam. However, nothing goes back into the environment as it is pumped back in our tanks to be used for future classes. The fuel and water system are designed to have minimal impact on the environment.”
