By GEORGE WHITEHURST
By the end of the year, firefighters from three area localities should finally be honing their skills at a new training facility.
Spotsylvania County, the city of Fredericksburg and King George County are chipping in $200,000 apiece for the project, which was first proposed in 2000. Stafford County was asked to participate but declined.
The Virginia Department of Fire Programs initially pledged to kick in $325,000, but recently upped that amount to $430,000.
Finding a suitable site for the center has slowed the project. The partners looked at land on Lansdowne Road and Tidewater Trail before settling on a site near the Motts Run Water Treatment Plant in Spotsylvania.
Fredericksburg City Manager Phil Rodenberg said the City Council will vote Tuesday to allot $250,000 for the project, $50,000 of which will go into a reserve fund in case of cost overruns. The council must vote on the measure twice.
The center will include a burn building for staging fires, a rappelling tower and a pump test pit.
Chris Eudailey, Spotsylvania's chief of fire, emergency and rescue services, hopes eventually to add training facilities for working hazardous-materials accidents and extracting victims from vehicles.
The construction site on Trench Hill Lane contains between 12 and 15 acres. Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County jointly own a portion of the land. Spotsylvania has sole ownership of the balance of the property.
Eudailey hopes both governing bodies will quickly hold public hearings on the matter and then agree to joint ownership of the entire property. Questions over the land ownership have delayed the project.
Spotsylvania County Administrator Randy Wheeler now expects few problems on that front.
"Barring an unforeseen issue, we expect all of the issues relating to the specific use of this property to be resolved by mid-February," he said yesterday.
Meanwhile, an architect is preparing designs for the training site.
A burn building is being ordered from Kansas-based W.H.P. Training Towers. Natural gas lines will make it blaze like a torch during training exercises.
"The building is going to take awhile once we put the order in," Eudailey said. "Then it will take a couple of weeks to bring it in and set it up. And then we've got to order the gas burners. I'm hoping, Lord willing, that we're going to be using that building by the end of this year."
Other features at the site will include a tower that simulates a multistory building.
Firefighters will practice setting up ladders against the side, and rappelling down.
"We're getting a lot more buildings five, six, seven stories, and we just want to be able to provide our people with the training without having to go out and put a ladder on a six-story hotel," Eudailey said.
The training site is an example of area governments sharing ownership of a facility in order to cut their individual costs.
"Between the building and the site work, we're going to be investing close to $1 million in this first phase," Eudailey said. "It's not something that's going to be used every day. By going in on this with the other localities, it can be used on a fairly regular basis."
Wheeler also likes the potential for "cross-pollination" that's possible when area fire and rescue teams train together, a sentiment shared by Eudailey.
"It never hurts for us to train together and be familiar with each other's abilities," Eudailey said.
Mark Kuechler, president of the Spotsylvania Volunteer Fire Department, is pleased that the new site will offer more flexibility for local fire and rescue training.
"We [won't] have to go to great distances from our areas of protection to have a great training facility," he said. "It's also going to give us an opportunity to engage in ongoing training, whereas before, we would have to wait for regional schools."
To reach GEORGE WHITEHURST:
Email: gwhitehurst@freelancestar.com