The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor

   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #661  
Our VFD recently burned a house for training. The property owner inherited the property with an old farm house and planned to build a new house. They had an estate sale with the proceeds going to the VFD. Then the VFD burned the house for training. Cleared the lot and built a new house on the site.
I guess you could call it that. Sounds like to me they hired the VFD equipment and manpower to demolish a structure for pay. Training was probably secondary but then again maybe they were bored. Glad to hear a recent example of it actually being done.
 
   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #662  
Thanks! Do I understand you correctly that this occurred in the 1960's? Or when?
No, the training fire exercise was maybe 5 years ago. The rest was just background on how this house became isolated and probably unsaleable
 
   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #663  
No, the training fire exercise was maybe 5 years ago. The rest was just background on how this house became isolated and probably unsaleable
Thanks! Did they charge anything at all? Who owned the property at the time the VFD burned it?
 
   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #664  
I have no idea on any of those questions. I assume the state/county/etc owns the property now, for freeway purposes. Probably why they used it for the practice...
 
   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #665  
I have no idea on any of those questions. I assume the state/county/etc owns the property now, for freeway purposes. Probably why they used it for the practice...
And there we are. How is the state/county/town the same as an individual when it comes to something like this? Didn't they just cleared a derelict structure from their own property?
 
   / The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor #666  
Has anyone ever actually had a "local FD do it for training"?

I see this said often but I've never known anyone who has had a FD or even a VFD burn anything for them for "training". If you have actually had that ahappen please post the details like what was burned, cost, results, etc.

The VFD's I know anything about don't do this. They have training but they don't burn private structures or land for training exercises. So, I'm genuinely curious about any true actual examples where this happens. The best I know of is a local VFD that would 'stand by' while the owner burned a structure for a donation but that was a long time ago.
When I lived in rural Maine I would occasionally burn fields in the spring or occasionally one or more buildings. For the buildings, the fire trucks would come out for training but I was the one that had to toss the match. They were all volunteer with little training but managed to control things. At times, it was scary.

Similar with the grass fires. For one field of 35 acres, I had maybe 20 guys with rakes come out to watch the edges and then had a couple pumpers full of water. I had one truck sit next to an old guy's dry wooden house and the other truck would be there just in case. Even so, I tossed the match.

Just get the wind the right way, some dew on the dusky ground and hope the stars were aligned. But that was then and this was now and these days I wouldn't take the risk. Age and experience changes the perception of risk.
 
 
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