NORTH PORT, Fla. — New help was introduced in Sarasota County to help train first responders.
The city of North Port unveiled a long-awaited fire tower to help train firefighters and make them better prepared at saving lives in cases of emergency.
The modular five-story building totals about 9,600 square feet. It's made of 31 freight containers and features burn rooms and confined space training areas.
There are rooms set up to look like a kitchen, dining room, bedroom and living room with different simulated scenarios. Firefighters will use the tower for team training, live fire and improving other skills and response times.
The fire tower will also serve as a regional training complex where mutual partner agencies can come in and train with the North Port Fire Rescue Department on different types of things they could encounter when working together.
After several attempts to bring it to life, the city paid for the tower with $2 million from Surtax dollars, with 35% paid through Fire Rescue District funds.
"It has been in and out of the budget many times throughout the years and there were times were this project has been sacrificed because there were other priorities with the city and it's been great to bring it back in," North Port Fire Rescue Department Chief Scott Titus said.
The tower has a range of open floor space and a total training area of around 9,630 square feet, with movable panels that would allow for changing the configuration of the walls and floors.
"So that it's not the same each time our crews go in or when we have other training partners coming with us to do things. The value to that is of course is that any fires we are going to see, it's not always the same so we can practice or even do limited visibility searches," said Titus.
"This gives us the opportunity to provide all different types of scenarios for structure fires in simulator responses and search and rescue in confined spaces and all types of technical rescue," he explained.
The fire chief says the five different burn rooms in the tower can also simulate different heat and smoke intensities depending on the levels required for a training exercise.