West Allis firefighters and SWAT team rip up old buildings to practice their rescue techniques

West Allis firefighters and SWAT team are letting it rip, as they tear holes in roofs and saw through big doors in hopes that the practice will pay off when they face emergencies.

Chr. Hansen, global bioscience company with a plant in West Allis, made it possible by inviting firefighters and police to do their destructive best on the 11 vacant buildings the company will raze. The apartment buildings that border its plant at 9015 W. Maple St. will be cleared so the company can expand.

“We’ve been part of the West Allis community for nearly 90 years,” Johan Weimann, president, Chr. Hansen North America, said in a news release. “It’s important to us that we collaborate with community members and organizations such as the fire department to create a better, safer community for us all.”

While firefighters practice their techniques every day on the department's practice tower, the Chr. Hansen offer enabled them to become skilled in a rescue that can't be duplicated on the tower, said Fire Chief Mason Pooler.

Firefighter rescue

It involves cutting a hole in a wall with a giant saw and punching the block out in order to save a trapped firefighter, he said.

This is a rescue technique that would have saved the life of a firefighter in another department in recent months, if the tactic had been known and practiced by the firefighters in that department,” said Lt. Brandon Foley, bureau of training and safety for the West Allis Fire Department.

Pooler said, "Our guys did that several times."

"I'd like to thank Chr. Hansen labs for reaching out to us," he said. It probably would have been easier and faster for the company to just raze the buildings, Pooler said.

The 11 buildings offer another advantage over the department's five-story training tower in that the firefighters are unfamiliar with them, Pooler said..

Twists, turns

Fire Lt. Steve Kaltenbrun agreed, saying, “Having these buildings is incredible because we’re in our normal training grounds every single day. We get used to making right-hand turns and left-hand turns all the time.”

“You put us in a new environment and it ups our skills, we critically think differently. It’s really beneficial,” he said.

Also, he said, having the opportunity to get on a real roof to practice roof cutting techniques is rare.

“We usually cut on a roof prop, which doesn’t take us through the whole process of putting up the ground ladders,putting up the roof ladders, climbing up and making the cuts because our prop is on the ground,” Kaltenbrun said.

SWAT

SWAT used the opportunity to test a number of kinds of saws on a range of different doors and different materials people use to barricade doors, said police Lt. Brian Saftig.

The SWAT team plans to buy a saw that would make for much faster and safer entries, he said. A saw is the quickest way through a door that is barricaded in some way that makes other breaching tools and techniques ineffective, Saftig said.

Chr. Hansen is a leading, global bioscience company that develops ingredients for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. It develops and produces cultures, enzymes, probiotics and colors for a variety of foods, confectionery, beverages, dietary supplements and animal feed and plant protection.

Chr. Hansen is based in Denmark, with plants in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North and South America.