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ROTTERDAM
Firefighters get new, closer training center
Facility allows for 2,000-degree experience
BY JUSTIN MASON Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter Justin Mason at 395-3113 or jmason@dailygazette.net.

    For decades, Rotterdam’s firefighters have needed to travel outside of Schenectady County for live fire drills.
    Years of drills at the training facility off of Campbell Road threatened to compromise the structure during the 1980s. So fi refighters from the town’s eight departments needed to either travel to facilities in neighboring counties or rely on drills that filled the building with smoke but never added the element of the searing heat that often occurs in real-life fires.
    With the help of $59,000 worth of private grants and donations, Rotterdam’s Fire Chiefs’ Association has retrofitted a room in the training tower with panels that will allow it to host Schenectady County’s only live fire training exercises. The panels —made from a material called Padgenite —will allow fi refighters to experience heat of up to 2,000 degrees inside the training facility.
    “You can’t do that with a smoke machine and you can’t do that with simulators,” said Fire Chief Dean Ronca of Rotterdam Fire District 2. “You need actual fire to do that.”
    Bruce Iovinelli, a firefighter and former chief of the Schonowe department, said the chiefs’ association is expected to finish a manual for the facility sometime later this month. By next month or early September, he anticipates the facility hosting its first live fire training exercise in more than 20 years.
    The panels are a culmination of more than 13 years worth of collaboration among the town’s districts. Iovinelli said the facility will prevent fire companies from having to travel long distances for their training, which can sometimes take both crews and fire apparatus miles away from their coverage area for hours at a time.
    “You have to take your apparatus out of service and you have to take a crew out of service with it,” he said. ...................>>>>.............>>>>........http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar01001