What is a Shipping Container?
US Fire Department Builds Container Home to Burn Regularly!
The Wichita Fire Department (WFD) has come up with an (almost) new version of a container home – one they can burn! The training tank resembles something that merchant mariners will be familiar with – the ‘fire tanks’ they must train in as part of their Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS) training. This, however, is about as far from the sea as is possible, in the state of Kansas.
WFD container house
As reported by KSN News, the eleven room container house is designed to replicate a decent sized, two floor family home. Though most of those homes we look at have at least some sort of architectural merit, this isn’t designed to look pretty.
The rooms within the container home are designed to be average sized for a home of this type. A range of furnishings such as beds, chairs and even baths / showers and toilets are installed in each room so the firefighters can get used to navigating around a home when it matters.
The facet of shipping containers we at the Gateway Gazette have yet to see celebrated until today is that they are capable of taking intense heat. This means they can have a range of types of fires in the rooms such as furniture fires, gas fires and even fat fires in its ‘kitchen’.
For the firemen they can both experience putting different fires out and rescuing people in the darkness of the smoke. Even wearing breathing apparatus, firefighters are largely blind in smoke-filled rooms without flames, so must feel their way around a home with its detritus of family life to get people and animals at various stages of life as they do.
Built with money in mind
As with so many public services around the world, the WFD
This has meant that a project that could cost the department a million dollars (money they don’t have) was built for a sum that they could reach.
One can only imagine that they were motivated by the urge to have real-world training time so rookies get a bit of seasoning before being thrown in the deep end when the alarms go off, and old-timers can keep on the ball.
Merchant marine fire tanks
Kansas is a good day’s drive in any direction from the sea! Even so, merchant mariners would immediately see the similarities with their SOLAS training. Fire is widely held as the worst emergency that can happen at sea. A thousand miles offshore you don’t have the fire brigade to hand so need to fix it yourself.
This is why part of many an officer’s and deck hand’s safety training will involve going into fire tanks like the one at Warsash Maritime Academy in the UK. In real world scenarios they get to deal with engine fires and every other type of fire that is likely to be found at sea (yes, even fires in shipping containers!).
Has this fired your imagination?
You may be reading this as part of your tentative research into building a fire tank for whatever reason of your own. About to move into a homestead in the Outback where fire and rescue services are out of reach? Perhaps you may want to train ranchers in the subject of fire and rescue so they can at least hope to get their family out of a blaze?
Give us a shout today to discuss your needs!
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