Members of the Block Island Volunteer Rescue and Fire Department have been training on the weekends for several months. This past weekend the department’s volunteers worked on what is known as a “vent, enter, search” technique, or VES, which trains firefighters to enter a smoke-filled house through a window, close any doors that may allow the fire to enter the room and to cool it down, ands to safely search the room for any individuals that may be trapped, according to BIVFRD Training Officer Riley Hobe.
Hobe said this was a two-person exercise, with one firefighter entering a room from one direction, and the other from the opposite. Hobe said that a mock bedroom and window had been set up in the Rescue Barn, and the smoke machine was turned on. Conditions were “very hot and you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” said Hobe.
The firefighters were trained to get on the floor to “sound it out to make sure it had not been structurally compromised,” said Hobe, who spent last fall at the Rhode Island Municipal Fire Academy. Riley said this training exercise took about three hours.