Fire department burns old house in training fire

Take heart in this Bigfork; your fire department is no good at starting fires.

The Bigfork Fire Department eventually got a blaze going in the old Keller home on the corner of Commerce Street Cascade Avenue Saturday morning, burning the home that they had been training in for a few months.

The two-story home was reduced to rubble in about an hour.

The department has been conducting training in the house since the owner, Dan Day, gave them the go-ahead to clear the property. Since the building could only burn once, the department would start fires in oil drums in the house to fill it with smoke to give firefighters real-life training on navigating and operating with full gear and no visibility.

"The last couple of months we've been doing interior attack," said Bigfork Fire Chief Wayne Loeffler. "We worked on how to go through with the interior attack team and the ventilation team. We also have a rapid intervention team in case something happens to one of the others."

On Saturday, however, the order of the day was to set the house alight and simply work to ensure that the flames didn't endanger any neighboring buildings, including a garage next to the house that was under power lines. The garage was eventually drug over onto the burning remains of the house.

Loeffler said a lot of preparation work went into getting the house ready to burn to satisfy air quality controls, including stripping it of carpet and shingles.

"We look around for those types of structures to do," he said. "But we have to meet a lot air quality standards."

The fire was an opportunity to test out the new ladder truck that the department took delivery of over the winter. Though, obviously not needed for any daring rescues, the high-volume nozzle at the top of the ladder put about 1,200 gallons of water per minute on the fire from above.

Ry Keller, who grew up in the home, stood by with his wife Serena and sons Ben and Austin and watched as the house he sold two years ago went up in flames.

"That was my bedroom right there," Ry said, pointing to what was left of the second floor room on the northern side of the house.

Keller, whose grandfather, Ben Keller, was one of the fire department's founders, said it was odd watching the flames, but that he and his family had severed their attachment to the home when they sold it.

"We sort of emotionally separated when it sold," he said. "We were resigned that someone would change it. It's probably a good thing."

It was a good thing for Bigfork Fire, too. It's not all that often that the department gets to practice controlling a fully involved blaze with nothing on the line.

"It went really well," Loeffler said. "It burned like we thought it would."