Firefighters train using ADMS

Published April 25, 2014
By Airman 1st Class John Linzmeier
22nd Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs

MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. -- A class of 12 firefighters from the 22nd Civil Engineer Squadron completed the Fire Officer II course here, April 18, using newly developed technology.

They were trained by instructors from Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, who brought an Advanced Disaster Management System, a virtual-reality trainer used to simulate emergencies that could happen on any military base.

"With ADMs, we can take young career firefighters and expose them to their first time acting as a fire officer," said retired Master Sgt. Michael Dejacomo, Department of Defense Fire Academy instructor. "They are able to take command of a scene and deal with human resource problems."

The 12-day course helps certify and prepare Airmen to become firefighter-crew chiefs using the Norma Brown training system. It enables them to take control of a team, a crew chief's responsibility if he was the first to arrive on the scene of an emergency.

The first nine days of the course are taught in a classroom setting while students learn different scenarios they may encounter and also how to react to each situation. The remainder of the course is hands-on-training with ADMS.

"They basically took video-game technology and applied it to training for command and control and firefighting," said Dejacomo, who helped develop ADMS for Air Force use.

An example simulation can begin with a team of firefighters driving a truck through the computer generated streets of Goodfellow AFB.

Instructors act as observers, evaluators, and for training purposes, 'arsonists.' From simple kitchen fires to aircrafts burning inside a hangar they create fires throughout the base to test student's abilities to command and control the scene.

"Everything is real time and physic based," said Dejacomo. "So if they don't put water on a fire, the fire grows. If they put the correct amount of water on a fire it goes out."

No training exercise can replicate the emotional gravity of a real fire scene; so instructors prepare a combination of variables for their students to raise anxiety levels.

Since there is no fixed script for each training session, Dejacomo said instructors constantly make adjustments to intensify the scenarios. They can change the size and location of the fire and number of victims who need rescuing.

"If you really wanna see stress levels go up," he said, "we'll put kids in the building."

Firefighters are graded on their performance and have a strict checklist to follow. If a student does not complete a task, he must redo the objective.

"They try to stress you out by throwing a bunch of stuff at you and get you flustered," said Staff Sgt. William Turner, 22nd Civil Engineer Squadron firefighter crew chief. "So you have to keep your cool and follow the training."

All firefighters in the Air Force still train with live fires regularly to maintain their mission readiness and proficiency.

The use of ADMS helps Airmen develop their command and control techniques with minimal health risks and experience a level of realism that cannot be found on a table-top setup, which was used to teach the previous course for the past 36 years.

"I thought the class was extremely valuable," said Turner. "It helped us to better understand how to control a scene, handle a large scale incident and manage all of our resources without letting them getting out of our span of control."

The ADMS' portability helps to significantly reduce Air Force expenditures. Rather than sending teams of firefighters to Goodfellow AFB to complete the course, it is now brought to different to bases across the Air Force.

"The things we teach are not just things they might run into someday," said Dejacomo. "When they get back to work, they're going to run into something we taught them. That's the most fun part about our teaching fire officer II."

Some firefighters may not encounter the catastrophes they experience while using the simulator, however, the command and control skills they have learned can be used immediately.

"It was one of the better advanced courses that I have gone through," said Turner. "We use this stuff all the time for all the mass casualty exercises that we do on base. The chances of us running into a large scale incident like this aren't necessarily high, but if that ever happens, were going to be ready for it."